21 March - 30 May 2009
polyglot - a speaker of many languages
glossolalia - speaking in tongues.

The exhibition will investigate the topic of language in contemporary art but at the point that it explodes, breaks down or becomes ecstatic. It is the place where we tell our stories and get lost in words.
The fascination in the limits of language is a recurring theme as much in the history of aesthetics as it is a point of departure for many contemporary artists. Polyglottolalia explores the edges of spoken and written communication and the currency of storytelling. It brings together diverse concerns united by a common wonderment at how language grows, decays, makes sense and invents nonsense.

Artists included in the exhibition Susan Hiller, Candice Breitz, Omer Fast, Erik Bünger, Johan Petri, Peter Rose, Marcus Gärde, Michael Klöpfer and Claude Horstmann.

Johan Petri and Marcus Gärde
vorschläge/förslag/suggestion, instruktion – interpretation (2009)

Sound installation, 4 CD players, speakers and lights approx 56 min. running time. typographic drawings and works on paper.

The work was specially commissioned for the exhibition and consists of a sound work by Johan Petri in which we hear the instructions of four musical pieces read by the composer Mathias Spahlinger in German, a translation into Swedish, a discussion by the six musicians who are to play the piece and the final performance itself. We also hear a collection of sounds made by the musicians the ums and ars and coughs that are part of their discussion. Gärde was asked to listen to the work and produce four typographic explorations of the original texts in Swedish and German. The works are then installed in the covers of the original musical score and flanked with a descriptive text about the process of the work written by Petri.

About the work
(text by William Easton, Curator)

Marcus Gärde was asked by Tensta Konsthall in conjunction with Petri to interpret the texts of Spahlinger and Petri’s sound work ‘typographically’. The original text of the four works was in taken from a collection published by the Viennese publisher Universal Edition that in turn became the point of departure for Gärde. On examining the black white and red cover and the typography of Universal Edition’s collection Gärde found a host of references from the work of Müller-Brockman and Tschichold to a play on the word Universe and another Swiss typeface designer Frutiger. One of the parts of vorschläge/förslag/suggestion, instruktion – interpretation is an attempt to correct what Gärde saw as the mistakes of the original typography of the score. He has painstakingly recreated a page from the score, enlarging it and correcting it by hand.

In another part he has invented a typographic mark-making that echoes his own relation to the music. He has documented his process so we see the stages of correction and interpretation. In some respects Petri and Gärde approach the work from diametrically opposed positions. This may also what gives it an intellectual charge and challenge. Gärde presents us
with something that is improved or the result of a personal relationship, there is a belief, perhaps a typographer’s belief, that one can and should correct, get to know, study, make better, fix, adjust. Some of his ‘corrections’ are on a micro level. For the untrained eye they are not always obvious and it is Gärde’s incredible attention to detail that is the motor.

Petri is also consumed by attention but unlike Gärde he is concerned by how meaning slips and slides in the process of human interaction. The discussion by the musicians does not give us a verisimilar Spahlinger or a healthier interpretation. The work in Petri’s view may exist between its moments of enunciation and not because of them. In these contradictions we are confronted by an interpretive cryptogram that in
many ways describes Polyglottolalia itself. We are aware of our own duplicity, our own desire to surrender to and be in control of language. Perhaps we are left like Lewis-Carroll’s.