Art Collaboration Kyoto

For our first time participating at Art Collaboration Kyoto, we will collaborate with Taro Nasu on a presentation focused on text as a central element in contemporary art. The booth will include works by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Ryan Gander, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Ryoji Ikeda, David Horvitz, Glenn Ligon, Mika Tajima and Lawrence Weiner.

The poetic text in Louise Bourgeois’s fabric work ‘I Am Afraid’ (2009) is taken from her own archive of writings and exemplifies how she used writing to confront and explore her anxieties. It deals particularly with the artist’s fear of rejection, which plagued Bourgeois throughout her life. 

Works from Roni Horn’s White Dickinson series employ texts drawn from various sources including poetry, letters and even fragments from other languages. Horn renders text as images, encouraging us to think about language as sculpture and hence removed from its meaning. 

Redefining the possibilities of contemporary art with her text-based works, Jenny Holzer made language both her subject and medium. ‘Selection from Truisms: Abstraction is…’ (2022) is a marble bench engraved with the text ‘ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE’ from her Truisms (1977–79) series, aphoristic statements distilled from political and philosophical texts.  

In ‘Redacted #11’ (2023) and ‘Untitled (Cancellation Prints)’ (1992 and 2003), Glenn Ligon uses recurring ‘X’ patterns to cross out text. This dense repetition transforms the writing into rhythmic compositions while evoking institutional censorship, historical erasure and political identity.