SALT Lecture WHO IS IN TOWN

How to Build a House Made All From Letters?

Shulamit Bruckstein & Verena Gerlach

Thursday, March 14, 2019
7pm | Cinema Hall

SALT Beyoğlu Istanbul

Walk-In-Cinema
How to Build a House Made All From Letters

Date: March 14, 2019
Time: 7 pm

Location: SALT Beyoğlu Istanbul

Walk-in Cinema

Shulamit Bruckstein and Verena Gerlach present House of Taswir, a book, curatorial project, artistic research agenda. Bruckstein, founder and author of House of Taswir, has been forming an imaginary platform for theory and art including texts and exhibitions, welcoming contributions from a loosely associated faculty of artists and scholars in widely spread geographies. In 2014, Gerlach designed Bruckstein’s publication of the same title, and transforming the medium of the book into an exhibition performance.

Both a book and a collaborative artistic agency, House of Taswir practices free association of objects, positions, places using semiotic techniques inherited from ancient Talmudic texts, the visual maps of Aby Warburg, Freud’s dream-work, and contemporary artistic practices. It cultivates methods of citation, inversion, displacement, veiling, cut-up, remix, repetitions, and explores methods and strategies of how to build a sustainable yet nomadic house for artists made from nothing but imaginary digits/letters.

Shulamit Bruckstein is a thinker, curator, theory-artist, and art critic. She is the author of House of Taswir – Doing and Undoing Things. Notes on Epistemic Architecture(s) (2014), and the founder of Taswir Projects, a collaborative platform in Berlin for artistic research and diasporic thinking. She held various professorships in philosophy and cultural theory in Berlin, Jerusalem, and Basel; authored more than 70 publications in visual theory, post-structuralism, philosophy, and fields of contemporary art. In 2010, she curated the Taswir exhibition at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. Bruckstein currently holds an artists’ fellowship at the German Kulturakademie Tarabya in Istanbul.

Verena Gerlach is a graphic designer, typedesigner, and typographer based in Berlin. Since 2006, she has been working freelance for art book publishers including Hatje Cantz and Kerber Verlag. Gerlach internationally lectures and runs workshops on type design, typography, and tapestry. Besides designing corporate fonts for global companies, she works with numerous contemporary artists and architects in typographic production of their publications. Her book Karbid – From Lettering to Type Design was published in 2013. Next year, she participated in a residency program at the Goethe-Institut Bangalore and researched lettering and the textile industry in India.

In collaboration with

Goethe-Institut Istanbul
Tarabya Cultural Academy

The talk is open to all.