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In the summer of 2009 in Berlin the shop sign "Friseurstübchen" was salvaged from a former hairdressing salon on Pallasstraße in Schöneberg, Berlin. The artists Louise Crawford and Stéphan Guéneau, living and working in Paris, will give a new artistic form to this redundant sign.
The series Language for Sale shows their interest in the citys signage and neon lighting. They began to recover obsolete signs and started reconfiguring them into wall pieces where the initial trading name (kept only as a title) was lost to the overall visual and aesthetic presence of style, scale and colour.
In the spirit of Fluxus and Dada and inspired by Scottish concrete and sound poetry the recovered metal, plastic and neon letters are traces of a citys past, Crawford and Guéneau endow them with a new story, status and a new lease of life. Letters are mixed up and lose their sense and meaning. Language has broken down. This reworking of the citys signage masks their origins as redundant signs abandoned after the collapse of a business or industry, desperately clinging onto architectural facades, their former role as signifier within the social space now gone.
An installation on the roof and inside the A trans Pavilion space provides a new context for the signs within the serendipity theme. A trans Pavilion functions as a window display for visitors memories and stories to unfold, where startling discoveries are revealed in the scenery and whose impact is played out in situ gradually and unobtrusively.
Press Release
Artists: Louise Crawford (UK) + Stéphan Guéneau (FR)
