read to/for

This exhibition explores reading as an artistic practice. It takes as its starting point the titular phrase by the poet Lisa Robertson. Her description figures reading as a space of temporal overlappings, in which meaning remains fluid, shifting and accumulating while simultaneously withdrawing. Different temporalities intersect in the act of reading: the time of the text, but also the time of reading itself, a time constantly re-actualized as the process of reading takes place. For this reason, reading is always a retrospective and simultaneous form of being. Different times and modalities of being do not exist in isolation; instead, they come to resonate, with their echoes and differentiations forming a rhythmic movement.

For this reason, reading is always also a form of mental listening, an internal rhythm with its own tempo, pauses, and repetitions. This rhythm shapes the act of reading as an auditory practice and reflects it as a multisensory experience.

This is the broader context for the exhibition, which will open the Bielefeld Kunstverein’s yearlong exploration of the ear as a sensory organ, including its connections to reading, hearing, and listening. Reading is understood here as a practice extending beyond the text itself, unfolding in the interplay of perception, memory, and imagination, as well as interior and exterior articulation.

The exhibition is conceived as a space for production and experimentation, where readings, performances, and installation works will appear in shifting constellations. Text is an integral part of the artistic practice of all of the invited artists, who in different ways combine reading and writing practices with installation, video, and sound.

More broadly, the exhibition addresses the conditions which make reading possible. What is considered legible and what remains hidden are shaped by historical context and systems of knowledge, as well as by codes, infrastructures, and arrangements of order. Reading appears simultaneously as a way of accessing these structures and as a moment of their productive interruption, particularly when comprehensibility falters and new processes open up, via questions of (un)readability and non-knowledge.

The works on display explore the performativity of language, using cross-generic writing practices in which texts are transposed into a variety of media and spatial situations, by way of fragmentation and poetic embellishment, and along their vocal dimensions. Writing also serves as a starting point for installation and performance works where reading, the body, and space are made tangible, as interconnected processes of meaning and perception.

Another element in the exhibition’s title, the phrase read to / for, marks a subtle shift within everyday linguistic movements, opening up an intermediate space of reading, one which defies easy definition. “To read to” implies a gesture of reading aloud, an addressed form of language, language which is directed and moves outward, whereas the phrase “to read for” instead conceives of reading in its referential orientation, without unambiguously defining the “what” that is being “read for.” Between these two formulations, an open field emerges in which reading can appear as a relational act, as something situational and context-dependent, whose mode of address is ever open to renegotiation.