I think of the warmth spun by the word

I think of the warmth spun by the word is a group exhibition that brings together visual, musical, and literary works in a single space, examining the role of the word throughout the entire process of creating an artwork. The exhibition space features quotations from world literature and philosophy, presented on equal footing with the participants’ handwritten texts and visual works. In addition, music is exhibited as a visual artwork, in the form of hand-drawn musical scores. The word is also presented as a sound.

The exhibition opens with a quotation: I think of the warmth spun by the word, a verse taken from the poem Approximate Man by Tristan Tzara. Quotations are further used as both a conceptual and spatial structure of the exhibition. In this way, the exhibition raises the question of the boundaries between intimate and public space within practices of writing and reading in the life of the contemporary individual, who encounters words everywhere around them. Does this point to the death of the author¹, in which words are granted supremacy, since they—unlike the author—are continually reshaped into different forms across different temporal categories? In any case, a text is always reborn through the reader, and within this exhibition, text functions as an idea that transcends micro-psychology and presupposes a certain humility on the part of the creator.

Minja Jovičin
art historian and writer

¹ An allusion to Roland Barthes’ text of the same name.