In this upcoming show, Els Hanappe Underground will for a second time bring together a young Greek artist, Nina Papaconstantinou, alongside an international artist, Corrina Peipon (Los Angeles). Main focus of the exhibition is the various approaches artists take towards the written word. Manifestoes, marginal notes, appropriation of text to accompany images, statements, word games, documentary text, these are only a few of the expressions, apart from publications, artist's writings, and artist's books, that witness the ongoing fascination of modern and contemporary art with language. Language can both be experienced as communication tool or as conceptual given. The artists start from a different background: Nina has studied drawing and her work devotes a lot of attention to the technical side of the medium, whereas Corrina has trained as a conceptual artist who uses a pencil or pen as a medium within her practice.

Corrina Peipon draws on the world of theatre and contrasts Shakespeare's characters Juliet and Richard, the one young, innocent, and forward looking, the other old, tired, and resigned. When Juliet sighs out: 'What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet', she inadvertently describes a fundamental idea about language and objects: that the condition of things and our experience of things in the world is more real than language. When Richard remunerates "I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.", he shows that capacity for thought and experience is what he is left with but the perception of his own identity forces him into whirlpools of regret. The artist will be showing drawings of words from Richard's soliloquy, the main theme of which is time and how objects are affected by time. It takes time to apprehend an object, and time is constantly changing objects - and our minds.

The drawings by Nina Papaconstantinou have been created by superimposing layers of text that were copied with the use of carbon paper from books to paper. Entire books, chosen in different languages, were reduced to one single surface by mounting layers of writing on top of each other. The results both reveal a certain shape of the text and create a new surface that turns language as a system of codes back into undecipherable information. They disregard the original text and its meaning and focus instead on the texture of the script as the image of the text. The idea of the handwritten copy or the reproduction of texts can be traced back to the monastic scribes but here their painstaking labor is ironically reversed as the drawings only reflect an image of the text and not the text itself.

The exhibition will use the occasion to display a number of artists' books and writings while a more extensive presentation will be made of Gagarin- the artists in their own works, a publication dedicated to original texts of international artists. Nina Papaconstantinou has recently made a contribution to the magazine, which will be on view at the gallery. Gagarin was recently presented at the Frankfurt book fair, and at the MUHKA in Antwerp.