Exhibition at FRAC Lorraine invites the audience to discern, decipher, construct . . . and imagine

METZ.- Digital book, electronic book, or e-book, are all terms designating the new forms given to the book, paperback, printed matter, or the manuscript. The creation and distribution of new reading tools undermine traditional modes of writing and reading which are facing a great challenge today.

To enter a three-dimensional book : this is what Anja Isabel Schneider invites us to do. She sees her exhibition as a reading in itself, subject to interruptions and suspensions generated by the architecture of the space. The selected works examine the relations and interactions between the text and the reader, the condition, the act, and the process of reading which give rise to meaning.

From the formes brèves1 in the space occupied by Jan Mancuška to Ewa Partum’s conceptual poems, from Amelie Dubois’ sound palimpsest to the taxonomy of words invented by Fabio Kacero, from Anna Barham’s wordplays to Charles Sandison’s ballet of words, these works foreshadow the changes in the reader’s behaviors in the digital age. Inscribed within the spaces of the 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine, this exhibition invites the audience to discern, decipher, construct . . . and imagine! Anja Isabel Schneider’s project questions the notion of reading in its various modalities of experimentation, experience, and structure.

Tania Mouraud, frise II : percevoirdiscerneridentifierreconnaître, 1992 série : Black Continent. Acrylique sur bois tourné, 29,5 x 888 x 20,5 cm. Collection de l'artiste. Photo : Philippe Bernard© l’artiste, ADAGP, Paris, 2011.

This exhibition explores the question of “fragmentary” or elusive reading—that is, reading which resists and unsettles the reader. Every reader/visitor is thus given an essential role–that of an active reader. As a secular literary form, the formes brèves privileges certain artistic genres: dedication, poem of circumstance, index, news flash, word play, witticism, haiku, fragment, maxim, etc. It solicits the imagination of the reader who is no longer a passive audience but becomes a producer. Between the texts and their readers, the spaces generated by formes brèves–blank or latent spaces–thus become a pause, a reflexive moment, a break for inspiration, an invitation to create. . .

Curator : Anja Isabel Schneider
Anja Isabel Schneider (born in Reutlingen, Germany, in 1976) is an art critic and independent curator based in London. She studied Art History in the United States (UCLA, Brentwood, California), in Germany (Eberhard-Karls-UniversitaÅNt, Tübingen) and in the UK (Courtauld Institute of Art), and is finishing her MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths University of London.

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