Placeless

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has experienced a time of uncertainty, misinformation, anxiety and confusion. These sensations and perceptions were widely materialised in contemporary art. As curatorial assistant of the art department of HypoVereinsbank, Munich, I was tasked with creating an exhibition concept with young up-and-coming artists. Reflecting contemporary urgencies, I decided on a work by the artist Marc Thalberg. His installation, "Placeless", constitutes an assemblage of split words on transparent foil that creates an engaging cloud of letters, rearranging parts of words with others, questioning the meaning of each word. This "word cloud" reflects the state of the world in which information becomes increasingly ambiguous and unreliable.

My curatorial aim for this exhibition is to express the feeling of insecurity and getting lost in the myriad of information surrounding us during the COVID-19 crisis. The cloud of words represents this emotion of anxiousness about being misinformed, making the wrong decisions and being blinded by various polarising opinions. The title ‘placeless’ refers to the proliferation of mass communication and the widespread presence of advanced technology, causing places to become increasingly alike, resulting in a loss of their unique 'sense of place' (Relph, 1976). As pointed out by Vogeler (1996), the construct of “[p]lacelessness dehumanizes the world and because dehumanized places have less or no human attachments, the people in these placeless places become even more vulnerable to more dehumanization.”

The glass cube "K4" is an inaccessible, isolated space that allows the artwork to expand in three dimensions while keeping the viewer at a distance. The thick glass walls between the viewer and the artwork could not relate more vividly to the way people have had to interact with each other during the pandemic.

The artwork deals visually with the abstraction of information that lies behind words and deconstructs them into rearrangeable signs. It refers to Ferdinand de Saussure's “le signifié et le signifiant ”, discussing the relationship between the signified (content) and signifier (expression, i.e. the word); however, deconstructing words thus firmly makes both become questionable in their reliability and authenticity. Thalberg plays with this uncertainty of meaning and brings to light the blurriness of communication, language and meaning.

Marc Thalberg is a German artist who lives and works in Munich, Germany. He recently opened a studio complex for artists to rent as work and exhibition spaces. He engages in community work and is part of the collective Not Another White Cube.