Art Installation in the Philologival Library (20.10.2015 - 12.2.2016)

Library of the Unreadable Characters - Die Bibliothek der unlesbaren Zeichen

compiled by the artist Axel Malik

Library of the Unreadable Characters is the title of an extensive art installation compiled by the artist in 2015 / 2016 at the Philological Library. Combined with the lecture series Schreiben als Ereignis (“The Event Nature of Writing”), it opens up a space between art and the academic world, where both sides introduce perspectives, strategies and structures into a conversation. Since 1989, Axel Malik has been writing on a daily basis, first in diaries, later on canvas as well. A writing project, which the artist calls scriptural method, is documented by millions of complex traces of the act of writing, resembling glyphs, recorded in more than 100 volumes with a total of over 30,000 pages, as well as on large-format canvases. All this cannot be read, at least not in the conventional sense. The characters have lost their point of reference, they are no longer symbols, signals or indicators. Strange and striking: No one of the characters occurs more than once, every one of them is posited individually, distinctively and uniquely. As a whole, they give format to an unreadable text, which is semantically empty and at the same time produces a differentiated structural language. Video installations, writing performances and acoustic archives of writing noises are an important part of his project.

When the art installation was removed, three multi-part works were left to remain in the library: An eight-part series of boards covered with gray writing. The artist created the characters by squirting semi-pasty acrylic ink onto the boards with large-volume medical syringes from a distance of about 20 cm at high pressure and at high speed, without the writing tip ever coming into contact with the writing surface. – Large standout single characters on the backs of the red steles that are part of the Library’s wayfinding system mark the levels of the building. – On both sides of the melon-yellow entrance area, two gray joints in the membrane and in the skin of the architectural body are equipped with inscriptions of a sketchy, fleeting and filigree appearance.