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Words with double r
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin Zimmerstraße 88-89, D-10117 Berlin
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Press Release what is dangerous body temperature - slot machine strategies - how to use chopsticks - naked women posing for art - speaking in the 1st person - save the day anywhere - boeing 747 construction plans - quotes on being big Adib Fricke is known for his works with words and language. In 1994 he founded The Word Company (TWC) and has since then been dedicated to neologisms that are meaningless in terms of content, such as URTUX or YEMMELS, and units consisting of words that frequently remind one of slogans (e.g. What You Say Is What You Give). In various ways, Fricke integrates these protonyms and rhetorically relevant fragments of sentences in existing communication infrastructures. In addition, TWC also accepts classical word- and name-giving orders for designating objects or institutions. The City of Munich, for example, decided at the beginning of 2002 to use Fricke’s neologism QUIVID as the name for its art-for-public-buildings programme. In the exhibition Wörter mit doppelt r (Words with double r), the artist presents an excerpt of his collection of anonymous words and word combinations which in previous months were entered in Internet search engines. He came upon them while observing so-called live searches, which several search engines offer, or in the log files of bait-and-switch pages on his own Web pages. After a prolonged phase of selecting and sorting, the artist now displays on each of 20 sheets which are printed like scores 38 such word combinations and search terms, finely listed underneath each other and divided into English and German (with wooden frames, 89.1 x 60.3 cm). In the gallery rooms, which received an archive-like character in this exhibition, four of these works are hung on each wall as a block, offering the viewers innumerable possibilities of creating their own associations and raising questions as to what the person searching was hoping to find. Anyone who has worked with search engines knows that it is not by entering entire sentences that one makes headway, but by entering keywords or fragments, and that an idea of what one is hoping to find is usually already condensed in these. The words and word combinations are arranged in such a way that no apparent narrative connection can be established between the lines, and that in regard to the appearance of the type there are few repetitions of the number of words per line beneath each other; each entry stands for itself and deals with its own thematic field. To a large extent, Fricke has taken over the spelling from those searching; only obvious spelling mistakes were corrected, and the logical links such as and and or are printed in capital letters. Last summer, Adib Fricke showed with Jam from Mexico in the stairwell of the Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene of the faculty of medicine of the Humboldt University in Berlin (Charité) a series of anonymous search words, applied in stepwise rising order on the plaster using adhesive letters. A permanent installation (Change something, 2001) with protonyms and units consisting of words can be viewed at the WissenschaftsForum on Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin-Mitte. The gallery additionally offers two new editions of the artist in conjunction with the exhibition: The two TWC protonyms SMORP and MISPEL are available as personal E-mail addresses in an edition of 30 exemplars each. --Barbara Buchmaier
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