Artist Window, Dock-Basel
The exhibition Artists’ Window: Space tag—Alltag shows works explicitly created for display windows by the three artists Matthias Aeberli, Sabine Hertig und Madeleine Jaccard. Their works question diverse spatial ideas and, as the double meaning of the title already suggests, play with the social dimension of space.
In English, “to tag” means to mark something in the process.
Space tagging—marking space or putting a sign in space—is an event that creates the space in the first place and is defined in its function.
In his work Matthias Aeberli is concerned with social concepts of space in the form of hierarchies. Sabine Hertig creates new “meaning spaces”: she works with headlines from newspapers and combines them to form writing pictures whose meaning visitors and passersby can interpret. Finally, Madeleine Jaccard develops the Y structure of chemical formulas—as a symbol of organic social network structures—into space.
With works by: Matthias Aeberli, Sabine Hertig, and Madeleine Jaccard
Sabine Hertig
Installation with newspapaer headlines, 2014
Dock-Basel
The title of the work Das Fenster als Bild—Gesendet und sogleich vergessen (The Window as Image—Sent and Immediately Forgotten) consist of two newspaper headlines. They are part of the first and the last headline collages. With the headline Das Fenster als Bild, Hertig is referring not only to the use of the window as a motif in artworks in general but also making a site-specific reference to the display window as image carrier. Here the display window has the function of an image carrier and is at the same time a display window for passersby. It becomes a framed visual field, a temporary time frame for headlines in which Hertig replaces the newspaper headlines with new ones at regular intervals. In the second half of the title, Hertig is thus alluding to the fleeting and short-lived qualities of the newspaper, from which she took the headlines for her work: “sent and immediately forgotten”?
