Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings, discussions and exchange with a focus on text in the field of contemporary art. Conceived as a group exhibition in progress, artworks installed at its inception will be in dialogue with numerous performative interventions taking place at and around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz over a course of four months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format considers text as the framework for or ‘skeleton’ of artmaking, expanding its status beyond the preliminary note. The exhibition serves as a page upon which artworks and performances are inscribed as interrelated notes— sampling, (mis)quoting and rehearsing themselves and one another. The exhibition’s title Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud unites two distinct references. It combines quotations from artist Moyra Davey’s book Index Cards and a hand-written note that the curator Gina Merz discovered in a copy of Kathy Acker’s Bodies of Work. In a chapter entitled Burn The Diaries, Davey employs a method of editing that implies a multitude of voices in addition to her own, while Acker’s essays explore the relationship between text, voice and interpretation. Artists employing text in their work have been invited to use the exhibition as a space for production and experimentation. A display that artist Ian Waelder conceived in conversation with the artists, curator and institution, forms a setting ready for interaction, as well as a site for reference and meeting that quite literally punctuates the space. An expansive MDF wall with five window cut-outs and a long plinth forms a sentence traversing the entire length of the building. Just as punctuation can dictate the flow of a sentence, the display directs the gaze through a series of cut-out ‘windows’ with Joshua’s Leon’s paint-stained glass panels onto the busy Karlsplatz intersection.