Jan Timme

For Jan Timme, art history is a thickly etched network of signs, and his work takes on artists like Duchamp and Broodthaers without getting too tangled up in allusions. With almost casual gestures, he devises a free-floating matrix of ambiguity anchored by often-humorous reference points. According to Timme, his current show is “an exhibition that isn’t an exhibition.” It consists merely of a 12 x 12” tile inscribed with the text CARRER QUI NO PASSA (roughly, “dead end”). A replica of a street sign that Timme came across on a trip to the Spanish island Menorca, the tile has been placed flush in the gallery wall at just above eye level. An uprooted sign, then, and a piece of regional craft, it is the basis for a reflection on how a work’s meaning changes with its environment. Extracted from its functional context, it becomes at once readymade and installation, replica and original. The text’s many possible translations unfold in an open and contradictory way. It remains questionable whether this carrer—a “street,” but also a “duration,” a “career,” or a “career path”—could also be an “impasse,” or even, in a way, an event that hasn’t yet come to pass. So the work’s meaning extends through and beyond the field of language, and makes the emptiness of the gallery into its arena.

Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.