The Secret by Marton Koppany
Installation, Edinburgh 2012
In 2012-13 THE DARK WOULD language art anthology project, gathered and exhibited work by over 100 contributors including some of the most noted artists and poets alive at that moment: Richard Long, Jenny Holzer, Fiona Banner, Maggie O' Sullivan, Tacita Dean, Tom Phillips, Tom Raworth, Nja Mahdaoui, Lawrence Weiner, Susan Hiller, Tsang Kin-Wah, Charles Bernstein and many, many more.
Many poets and artists share the same primary material: language. Conceptual art, vispo, text art, outsider art, conceptual poetry, flarf, concrete poetry, live art, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, sound scores... The anthology was split between two volumes – paper and virtual. Many of the works were in two parts, speaking to one another across the paper/virtual divide, as a metaphor of dis/embodiment, considering time, mortality and human traces in the natural world.
As Editor Philip Davenport writes: “THE DARK WOULD asks what it is to live in a body now, knowing that one day we won’t be here. Perhaps this is best done by people for whom language is itself a state of between-ness. Here is a gathering of artists who use language and poets who are in some wider sense artists.”
Summerhall Gallery hosted the world premiere of this ground-breaking exhibition curated by Davenport in 2013. Photographs of this exhibition are now shared (many for the first time) in this issue of Synapse as a 10th anniversary marker, set deeper into the woods we all must traverse.
In 2012-13 THE DARK WOULD language art anthology project, gathered and exhibited work by over 100 contributors including some of the most noted artists and poets alive at that moment: Richard Long, Jenny Holzer, Fiona Banner, Maggie O' Sullivan, Tacita Dean, Tom Phillips, Tom Raworth, Nja Mahdaoui, Lawrence Weiner, Susan Hiller, Tsang Kin-Wah, Charles Bernstein and many, many more.
Many poets and artists share the same primary material: language. Conceptual art, vispo, text art, outsider art, conceptual poetry, flarf, concrete poetry, live art, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, sound scores... The anthology was split between two volumes – paper and virtual. Many of the works were in two parts, speaking to one another across the paper/virtual divide, as a metaphor of dis/embodiment, considering time, mortality and human traces in the natural world.
As Editor Philip Davenport writes: “THE DARK WOULD asks what it is to live in a body now, knowing that one day we won’t be here. Perhaps this is best done by people for whom language is itself a state of between-ness. Here is a gathering of artists who use language and poets who are in some wider sense artists.”
Summerhall Gallery hosted the world premiere of this ground-breaking exhibition curated by Davenport in 2013. Photographs of this exhibition are now shared (many for the first time) in this issue of Synapse as a 10th anniversary marker, set deeper into the woods we all must traverse.
No secret, I'm still grateful to Phil and Tony for the whole Text Festival-Dark Would period, its interconnected events and publications. :-) ALL the best, Márton
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