ALPHABET

The Alphabet exhibition presents artistic activities featuring writing, visual text, and letters that become images. The idea of the exhibition is to show the intermingling in contemporary art of methods of communication inherent in the reading of text and visual perception.

The exhibition features works by artists from different generations, referencing diverse traditions and representing different artistic convictions. The common denominator is the use of the written word, writing with drawing, painting, photography, collage, and the body, combining the visuality of art with its textuality. The practices of the artists presented show the ambiguity of the phenomena in which writing and letters are the result of visualisation of experiences: writing as drawing, picturing using writing, constructing the alphabet using body language or the dynamics of gestures, processual writings and recording everyday emotions using writing devoid of semantics.

The exhibition includes different versions of “alphabets” – works in which the artists chose the basic writing system as their starting point, filling it with new meaning and references. They transformed letters into a much more meaningful message than writing symbols. An alphabet shaped by the dynamics of gesture in processual notations, an alphabet as notation of artistic ideas, an imaginary alphabet transformed into abstract writing, an alphabet built using body language, and alphabet of feminist contestation written with a rebellious body, an alphabet game as a way of referring to past utopias.

Writing takes very different forms, from recording subjective experiences to manifestations carrying themes critical of the observed reality. The presented works also recall various traditions, from conceptual and post-conceptual practices to feminist critique, from confessional stylistics to radical polemics with the pressures of cultural ideologies.