Process Room, 28.10.09- 08.11.09

The exhibited work has been realised during Tine Melzer’s residency at IMMA. Working on the edge between verbal and visual language, the artist’s visual work increasingly involves concepts of language ‘as a social network’ and notions of meeting, dialogue and strategies of co-operation. Based on the interaction between text and image (or text and its environment), the work aims to examine mechanisms of dialogue and exchange, in a sometimes iconic or ordinary way: Melzers work challenges our habits and codes in language. Current forms of expression are authoritarian looking plaques and statements cast in stone side by side with small everyday objects and gestures charged with an alternative meaning. For example, a long-term project, in which two writers of the past, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, are meeting in language, has brought about the first work of this new series: obsessed with public memorials for writers and their entourage, Dublin has a number of locations to offer, where Wittgenstein stayed in his later years. Playing with ideas of absence and meeting, one of these places – in the Botanic Gardens, Dublin – acts as a physical location for an (im)possible meeting of both characters.
(With thanks to Nadja Bournonville).

Currently, another work, which attempts to reveal mechanisms of dialogue and meeting in its simplicity, is a series of badges distributed amongst the visitors. The mass-produced badges state: This is how we meet. A simple self-referential sentence, which will – like a tautology – always work as soon as the ‘other’ is close enough to read the text.  

Another recent work, a co-operation between visual artist Tudor Bratu and Tine Melzer, is the visual outcome of a series of public interventions in Ireland in autumn 2009. Their approach is based on the intersection of both artists practice: located between signs of verbal and visual language, they approached the quest into meaning by manipulating existing (urban and city) landscapes with large scale texts. Their interventions feed from the thought that any given context and specificity of situation in place and time can be charged with (another) meaning.
Melzer studied visual arts and philosophy and has been a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. She is currently reading for a PhD at the Planetary Collegium.  Recent exhibitions include: Cheer Up Fellows!, Utrecht; Inventory, Johan Deumens , Haarlem; The Order of Things, MuhKA, Antwerp; Non-knowledge, Project Arts Centre, Dublin and A for Alibi, de Appel, Amsterdam.  Recent publications include Inventory, 2008 and Dialog, 2008. Recent awards include a stipend by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Amsterdam and a stipend by FKVB. Melzers work is represented by Gallery Johan Deumens and Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. For more information please visit www.tinemelzer.eu

For a printable version of this information please download the following document: Tine Melzer: The Process Room (Word doc 2000 – 32KB)

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