Chapter 3. THE DARK WOULD









ABOVE
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. 

Charles Bernstein interviewed by Philip Davenport (NYC 2012)


The Dark Would EXHIBITION 2013 photographed 

Works by arthur+martha, Erica Baum, Caroline Bergvall, Joseph Beuys, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Maria Chevska, Matt Dalby, Philip Davenport, Steve Emmerson, Alec Finlay, Rob Fitterman, Steve Giasson, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Susan Hiller, Jenny Holzer, Marton Koppany, Laurence Lane, Richard Long, Tony Lopez, Stephane Mallarme, Darren Marsh, Simon Patterson, Tom Phillips, Sarah Sanders, Ron Silliman, Carolyn Thompson, Carol Watts and Richard Wentworth.



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. 



Comments

  1. 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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