Language/Text/Image

Spoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change— that we share responsibility for them.

Dr. Barbara Segelken studied art history and theater studies at the Freie Universitä t Berlin and Humboldt-Universitä t zu Berlin. She has been working for the Draiflessen Collection since fall 2014 and has already curated the exhibition “ The Art of Storage” , also together with Olesja Nein. Birte Hinrichsen is the research associate and curator of Draiflessen collection. She lives in Hamburg and studied art history and folklore/cultural anthropology. Corinna Otto has been the director of the Draiflessen Collection since 2014. She studied adult education, art history and philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, where she completed her doctorate in 2000 on the communicability of contemporary art. After many years as managing director of the Oldenburger Kunstverein, she worked for five years in private collection management and art consulting. From her career, it quickly becomes clear that she is concerned with the mediation of art and that she is developing the Draiflessen Collection with an interdisciplinary approach. Martin Rudolf Brenninkmeijer is the president of the Draiflessen collection.