Newspaper Poems, 2002

Installation view: The Ecologies of Peace. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2024. Photo: Imagen Subliminal (Rocio Romero y Miguel de Guzmán).
Collection

12 Newspaper collages, glazed and framed in wood
19.3 x 24.2 x 4.1 (each collage closed) | 19.3 x 48.4 x 4.1 (each collage opened)


Over the past years Janet Cardiff has been making collage poems with words chosen at random from specific newspaper articles. “I started cutting out words and putting them together in a surrealist style of collage. It was like poetry, so I decided to make it into a series: I’d pick a newspaper article every once in a while that strikes me and do a piece with it.” Displayed in the ancient form of a diptych, the visitor is encouraged to touch and open the tablet in order to read the full poem. While the front pages consist of dadaesque playful combinations of words, the interior pages put them into a critical context, addressing current political issues such as the Gulf war and the Bush administration.


*1957 in Ontario, Canada I Living and working in Berlin, Germany