my private corpus

Announcement

Villa Grisebach Gallery will start »Projects«, a new exhibition series. At intermittent intervals the gallery will invite artists to develop projects made specifically to negotiate relevant issues in contemporary art. The first in this series is Adib Fricke, The Word Company, who will present my private corpus.

my private corpus is a compilation of text fragments that Adib Fricke extracted from interviews published in art magazines. This project inverts the usual chronology of a gallery exhibition, however, by displaying the extracts in random order. my private corpus began with two advertisements in the current issues of FlashArt (#247) and Frieze (#98). Fricke has selected one sentence for each magazine, while other, arbitrary texts appear on the project’s web site. Eventually an installation of text pieces that explore the visual logic of art magazines and the relationship between their contents and forms of discourse will be displayed in the gallery space.

Adib Fricke has been working with words and text since the late 1980s. For many years, the artist compiled a text corpus in order to create a large pool from which he can draw for new projects. While Fricke purposely fragmentizes the texts so it is impossible for the viewer to attribute them either to any specific author or to establish any direct reference at all, he has applied markers for himself, relating to content and form, which allow him to select texts from the corpus according to a specific logic. In his new work, with these text groupings, Fricke develops installations that function as associative rooms.

—Edzard Brahms / Monika Stump, Villa Grisebach Gallery