The Art of Writing

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

With its Artist in Residence programme, the Cluster initiates fruitful encounters between researchers and artists who are working with script in the broadest sense. This connection yields new event formats, such as an event at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

In late 2021, the EXC ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ established a working group on ‘The Art of Writing’, which formed around the Cluster’s ‘Artist in Residence’, Axel Malik. Malik’s ‘scriptal method’ – that is, his art of producing handwritten, unreadable signs – questions common notions of writing, according to which its function is exhausted in the communication of meaning and the representation of language and text.    

‘The Art of Writing’ actively promotes a dialogue between art and science. A result of this collaboration is a workshop at the Deichtorhallen Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Hamburg from 11 to 12 May 2023. Entitled ‘Beyond Visualising Language’ (‘Mehr als nur Worte: Die Kunst des Schreibens’), the workshop not only highlighted different writing traditions, such as Manichaean, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Georgian, and Chinese. It also fostered a dialogue between artists and scholars. Together with the audience, it explored the relationship between writing and language, word and sign, readability and unreadability, function and aesthetics, meaning and appearance.

The workshop included contributions by the artists Dagmara Kraus, Philipp Loersch, David Maisuradze, Axel Malik, Timo Nasseri, Axel Malik, and Mirko Reisser (DAIM), as well as a keynote lecture by the philosopher Sybille Krämer.