Lesewald / Reading Forest

Ferdinand Kriwet has been focusing on the changing perception of texts in the age of mass media since the 1960s. At that time, he was a member of the Düsseldorf avant-garde. His complex oeuvre includes radio plays, texts, and visual poetry, such as his Rundschreiben / Circular Writings, in which letters, words, and sentences are arranged in a circle and can be considered and experienced through contemplation. Every “reader” creates individual contexts of meaning.
As a sculptural variation of this basic theme, Kriwet’s Reading Forest operates similarly. The “forest” is made up of fifteen columns of different heights with the same diameter. They have all been printed in black and white with a single word that is repeated several times along the surface. Nonetheless, the text is difficult to decipher, since the individual letters remain as fragments. In this way, they look more like graphic elements than verbal signifiers. The viewer has a choice: You can see the work as a symbol of the daily over-stimulation created by media text messages. Or you can go into the forest and acquire an entirely individual work of concrete poetry.