Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud

On annotating, editing and making text in contemporary art

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings, discussions and exchange with a focus on text in the field of contemporary art. Conceived as a group exhibition in progress, artworks installed at its inception will be in dialogue with numerous performative interventions taking place at and around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz over a course of four months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format of the exhibition considers text as the framework for or ‘skeleton’ of artmaking – expanding its status beyond the preliminary note. The exhibition serves as a page upon which artworks and performances are inscribed as interrelated notes – sampling, (mis)quoting and rehearsing themselves and one another.

Artists employing text in their work have been invited to use the exhibition as a space for production and experimentation. A display that artist Ian Waelder conceived in conversation with the artists, curator and institution, forms a setting ready for interaction, as well as a site for reference and meeting that quite literally punctuates the space.