Suzanne Treister

Public Notices

A piece of paper hangs from a fence.

Year
2018

Medium / Material / Technic
Laminated prints

Place
Schlachthof, substage

Today’s cities overflow with slogans, advertisements, and announcements; they are in constant conversation with their inhabitants. Suzanne Treister’s colorful notices blur boundaries between object, text, and image, resembling the experiments of Dadaists and Futurists who liberated texts from the limits of narration and linearity. They also subtly echo the style of visual poetry, in which the arrangement of elements is more important than carrying meaning.

»Public Notices« employ buzzwords of contemporary digital culture and add further absurd overtones by combining originally paper-based experiments with digitally saturated realities. In this way, the piece comments succinctly on the expansion of artistic media and historical changes in urban communication. Since the 1980s, Treister’s work has been preoccupied with video games, surveillance, the history of the internet, and cybernetics. In Public Notices she continues to address technologies and their implications, while deliberately keeping to older media.