Outernet Arts and Serpentine continue an innovative partnership presenting the digital artwork Silent Writings (2009/2024) by American artist Barbara Kruger, which explores how we communicate and connect with global events and with each other.
The piece weaves images and words to engage issues of control, power and dominance. Kruger incorporates her own words alongside quotes from writers and philosophers including Aimé Césaire, Goethe, Thomas Mann and Mary Therese McCarthy. These quotes touch on themes of violence, political
modes of operation and spectatorship. Kruger manipulates selected words, enlarging or removing them to highlight their meanings and to create new ones. Opposing terms like contact/isolation, order/horror, stupid/clever become fluid and interchangeable.
Throughout the piece, cropped found documentary photographs of conflicts, politicians and mass media images briefly appear between sentences, serving as illustrations of the words or evidence of their relevance. As in many of her works, the artist addresses viewers directly to make us question our beliefs, perspectives and how we perceive the world.
Silent Writings connects with the artist’s latest exhibition Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., currently on display at Serpentine South, and is Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years. The exhibition continues until the 17th March 2024.
About Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (born 1945, Newark, NJ, USA) is an artist who works with pictures and words. She lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. After spending two years at Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design in New York, she began working as a designer and picture editor at the Condé Nast magazines Mademoiselle and House & Garden. Frequently borrowing from the language of advertising and graphic design, her practice often explores the complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, and capital. Her work has been shown in international art institutions and across public spaces, including installed and projected onto buildings, billboards, hoardings, cars, buses, and skate parks, and printed in newspapers. She is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art at UCLA.
About Outernet Arts
Outernet Arts is an independent arts organisation located in the heart of London, offering free and accessible exhibitions in one of the world’s largest digital spaces. With screens spanning the height of four stories, the organisation presents a year-round program every Sunday from 12:00 to 18:00. It aims to bring together a diverse network of both established and under-represented artists, commissioning projects that explore the complexities of the “media space.” Through artist-led initiatives, Outernet Arts sparks meaningful discussions about our existence in a digitally dominated world.
About the Serpentine Exhibition
Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years. It features a unique selection of installations alongside moving image works and multiple soundscapes. The exhibition is the UK premiere of Untitled (No Comment), 2020. This immersive three-channel video installation explores contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online. In the work, Kruger combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats.
The exhibition also features recent video reconfigurations – or, as the artist calls them, replays – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989). Over decades, Kruger has presented her work across various spaces and forms, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, and skate parks. For this exhibition, the artist has adapted works, which were recently presented at museums in the United States, to specific locations within Serpentine, both indoors and outdoors.