Interview with Tim Etchells about Qu’y a-t-il neon for Centre Pompidou

15 October 2021
In red neon letters reads 'OU'Y A-T-IL ENTRE NOUS?' on the side of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Interview with Tim Etchells about Qu’y a-t-il neon for Centre Pompidou

Could you tell us a bit more about the project you are presenting at Centre Pompidou ?

It’s a new work, commissioned especially for Pompidou. The full phrase is “Qu’y-at-il entre nous?” The letters are made of neon – in classic neon red, and they’re backed with Dibond letter forms to give the work greater definition. The letters are 3m high and the full phrase is around 42m long. The idea was to make something that spoke from the context of the building, to the square below and out to the city.

How did you choose the words up there, and what do they mean for you ?

As with many of my works I try to find a way of using language to open thoughts, questions, stories and ideas in the viewer. It’s important to me that the work is complex, plural – that different people will find different meanings in them. In this work I was thinking about the work and its place on a major building, in relation to this huge public square – a kind of heart of the city. I was thinking about connection, about the different kinds of links, stories and narratives that are unfolding in that space. I liked the idea of what is between us, in that it raises this question about connection and intimacy – what is it that we share, what are the stories that we are wrapped in together. It’s a very social question, a very political one in the broadest sense. At the same time I am intrigued by the idea that this question also raises the idea of division – in English ‘between’ is also about what might be a barrier or obstacle between things or people. So what is between us also starts to open questions about division – what are the things, the forces, the narratives, the conditions that divide us? These seemed like great ideas to speak to in the centre of a great city, on the walls of a major public building – basically encouraging people to think about different forms of connectivity and separation in society, in the world.

When did you start those giant light installations ?

We used neon phrases as part of early stage-designs for Forced Entertainment, in 1987, and in 1991. The first neon sign I made for another context – part of the art exhibition Art Sheffield – was done in 2008. I was excited by the idea that the work was in public space, in dialogue with the city. Every time a work gets made for a new place, or when an existing work gets installed in a new location, there’s always a kind of conversation with the environment around – different pieces take on new meaning, according to where they are positioned. The works in city space have an interesting temporality too – people pass them at different times of day, at different moments in their daily routines. And sometimes they pass by many times over periods of weeks and months. I like the way that, in these circumstances, the works enter people’s everyday experience – a phrase used in a work can be striking or inspiring and then fade into the background, only to be noticed again at some later moment. In this situation the text has the chance to resonate in many different ways – in different moods and energies of the city and the weather.

How do you play with the language, and what hidden meanings lie there ?

Most important for me is the idea of gaps, or space… so the things that are not said are often as important as the things that are said. In the case of this work “Qu’y-at-il entre nous?” (roughly in English ‘what is between us?”) there are many things unsaid – it’s not clear who is speaking, or who they are speaking to – so the possibility is there to imagine it in many different ways. Is it a question about the relation between many people? or about the relation between two? Is it about the building? Or about the city? These ambiguities or possibilities are important for me because they mean the work stays complex – a small number of words multiply to produce many different meanings, all of which are held in a kind of constellation or tension.

In what way does the city influence you ?

In the broadest sense I’m drawn to the city because of the way multiples lives, stories and agendas are moving through it at all times. The city is a machine that links and separates us in different ways, a machine that also reflects and bears traces of all the other systems and structures that define our lives. In this public space work has a great possibility to touch people. Im also drawn to the way that the city is a space of contradiction – personal and impersonal, intimate and massively social. It’s the perfect location to think about ideas about society and about connection and division.

Tell me more about Sheffield, and the beginnings of Forced Entertainment (I see your last
book has an intro by beloved Jarvis Cocker)?

We started Forced Entertainment in Sheffield in 1984. The decision to move there was a little random – we were heading north, to the place where resistance to Thatcherism was at its strongest, to a city that at that time was pioneering a very different (socialist) approach. There was a creative force, a subversive humour, and an amazing space for non- mainstream ideas in cities like Sheffield at that time. In another sense Sheffield was good because it was relatively isolated – we could live cheaply, quickly found an old industrial space to work in and we were not distracted or sucked into influences as we would have been in London. We quietly held a space for each other to collaborate, to research, to start creating work. That was the most important thing – we had a good few years at the beginning where we could really focus. We had no funding… but we made time. Jarvis lived above one of our first rehearsal spaces. For many years Pulp and Forced Entertainment were in quite smiler positions – working hard locally, developing our approaches. Forced Entertainment never quite got to the stadium level! But I think both Forced Entertainment and Pulp show something of what can come out of the kind of strong regional contexts in the UK, in adverse political and social conditions.

Would you say your work is political ? In what way ?

Yes, I think of the work in political terms. The questions of relation it raises – thinking in this case about our relation to each other (connection and division) – is of course a really political one. What are the forces that link or separate us? In another sense for me there’s a politics in the way my work tries to open space for other people. It’s less about statement and more about creating a zone in which others react, imagine and think for themselves. To me that’s important across all the forms I work in. I’m less interested in ’saying something’ than I am in creating a space for others to think deeply, creating a tension, a space in which certain ideas circulate, in all their contradiction.

As an artist, who would you say influenced you ?

A lot of my work comes from performance of course, from a very performative understanding of what language does and can do. The idea of open-ness, of an unfolding event that needs audience to ‘become’ something (something different each time) comes to me most strongly from there. Contradictory meanings in tension, audience as a space in which many different reactions are taking place at the same time – these understandings all come from performance. As for direct artistic influences – there are so many, and from so many areas. The DIY sprit of Punk and New Wave music were important for my generation. At the same time, I’m very connected to experimental literature, to conceptual art, to contemporary music. It’s not so much a matter of taking direct influence – but there are certainly artists whose work with text and language have been inspirational. I’m a Perec fan… and more recently Annie Ernaux has been a real important figure for me. I loved The Years so much and I find the way she creates this space which is personal-and-social/shared through language super interesting.

This interview with Tim Etchells first appeared in French in Centre Pompidou magazine.

Conversation with Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva

Tim stands to the right with a microphone behind a music stand. Aisha stands to the left holding a violin and bow.

Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva, in conversation with artist Vlatka Horvat about their text and music performance collaboration Heartbreaking Final (2021).

VH: You’ve been improvising together as a duo for some years now – what was the impulse for developing this larger collaboration?

TE: Most of what we’ve done as a duo has been pure improvisation – me working with text fragments pulled instantly from my notebook, Aisha proceeding from quite immediate impulses or discoveries regards violin material. The idea here was to make something with more structure, a planned longer-form work that has a clearer focused sense of itself and a dramaturgy in text terms and in musical terms. It relates to the work we’ve done before – there are approaches we’ve developed which we continue to draw on – but the challenges and the opportunities are quite different.

AO: When you are trapped in a limitation of a single violin against the stories, the narratives, the images of Tim’s words and his voice – you begin to look for all the possible ways out of that single violin voice, so it stops being just a violin. We discover a lot of unexpected ways to connect, to find and to replace each other in that process of escaping. As much as I enjoy it, the downside is not being able to develop the material fully, it’s like walking on the edge of a forest but never going in.

TE: Working together but with other performers in the room too is also something new – having John, Nicki, and Chihiro in the mix brings unexpected energies and understandings into play.

VH: In terms of instruments, Aisha you’ve constructed this piece for two violins – what’s your attraction to this doubling or dialogue?

AO: Working with Tim started me off on an improvisation/composition route where I’d spend more and more time experimenting with different violin sounds and I feel like I know the violin sound world better than any other instrument. I always tried to have “multiple” voices happening when improvising with Tim and I often wished there was one more person sharing a voice to make the texture richer, more complex.

VH: What about the decision to explore multiple speaking/performing voices in this work – is the motivation similar?

TE: Yes, my thinking relates to Aisha’s – in the duet work I’ve always enjoyed the way that the speaking voice is texture, energy, sound: musicality as well as semantics. And I’ve been interested to extend that understanding of the voice. Creating something for three voices allows me to play with overlapping layers of speech and with the device of interspersing or intercutting words and phrases from different speakers – there’s the possibility for sense, but also new possibilities for noise and for non-sense as well as a chance to create new, less straightforward, or obvious kinds of meaning. In performance terms I’m fascinated by energy or focus imbalance and by processes of transformation – how something playful becomes something serious, how something comical becomes upsetting – having three voices in the mix creates the possibility to work with different impulses at the same time. There are moments in the performance when one of us is very soft, and another will be very agitated or combative with the text, the two moods in a kind of unresolvable relation.

VH: Thinking about those kind of counterpoints – how much of Heartbreaking Final is improvised? Are there scored elements? What form does the score take?

AO: For both the music and the voice there are elements that are fixed, decisions that are made in advance but within that frame there is room for improvisation. Musically there are scored elements to give general information about each piece like pitch, metre, rhythmic patterns, technique, any specific preparation, timings. It is mostly a text-based score which is half-notated in Sibelius.

VH: I was thinking about the relationship between voice/text and the musical elements of the piece, how they meet each other. What are the opportunities of working between words and music? And what are the pitfalls? Are there things you try to avoid?

AO: We aim for a relationship where the two are equal and where the roles are sometimes swapped, sounds becoming more like speech patterns with words getting closer to music. But also, at times the text and the sound don’t belong together, they stand apart. It’s always in motion – the text and the violin sound try to be together; they are together, they cover each other up and one becomes inaudible. Above all we try to avoid a scenario where music acts as an accompaniment to the text. From my experience that lack of hierarchy can be difficult to achieve because words are easier to hold on to, I find that in almost anything as soon as you hear someone speak your focus shifts.

VH: Tim, how do you see the relation between Heartbreaking Final and your other performance work, with Forced Entertainment or in other contexts?

TE: There’s certainly a shared ground. My interest is always chiefly in the live unfolding and negotiation of something in public – playing with the flow of information over time, with the shifting relation to the viewer, between intimacy and distance. And language itself has been a constant preoccupation – how to work with text and at the same time question, undermine or reveal its authority, its power to frame and fix meaning. Lots of the projects with Forced Entertainment have those goals. There’s tactical common ground too – the bare, straightforward set up for the performance, the use of listing and repetition are things that characterise a lot of my work. The biggest connection though is probably to my work with language in an art context. In the neon, LED sculptures and other text works I’ve been doing since 2007 there’s often an insistence on a single phrase or fragment – a line taken out of context that one has to see and see again, each moment of looking at it opening other readings or interpretations. The work in Heartbreaking Final performs a similar insistence at times, not turning a single phrase into a material object but into a sonic and temporal one, something that has to be heard and heard again. The effect is to open space for the audience, a space of imagination, contemplation – that’s another shared ground in this work.

VH: Aisha, as an instrumentalist you draw on a wide range of repertoire – what do you bring with you into a project like this one? Not influences as such – but ways of thinking or doing?

AO: Working with repertoire from Early Music to contemporary avant garde teaches you many ways of thinking and approaching music and sound. That exposure influences the way you think, the way you hear and the way you internalise music. You bring an open mind to a project like this. Also, stylistically it opens up possibilities where you can go from a single scrape or white noise polluted texture of an overpressed bow to something very fragile, melodic or 400 years old that’s coming to us through cracks of a battered bow.

VH: What holds it together? Do you think about there being a narrative shape to the work? A thematic?

TE: There’s not a narrative. What unfolds is the text, the music. You’re watching the five of us dealing with and negotiating the material of different kinds, it’s a task. That connects to aspects of my work with Forced Entertainment of course but there’s a new liberation in this piece – it deals with a different kind of journey, a sonic, emotional one rather than a dramatic one. As text-performers we’re also musicians, with the additional nuance of course that the text is always producing ideas, questions and images. I think what holds the whole thing together is a movement back and forth between interior and exterior – there’s a lot of material that feels like stream of consciousness, very internal, self-description or self-narration and then other material that’s much more exterior – images that give a sense of a larger world: landscapes, cities, people. We didn’t set out to create something that mapped into the last 18 months, the pandemic, the simultaneous sense of isolation and global connection that it has produced – but of course that’s the context in which we’ve been developing the material though this time. Thinking about the piece now I feel that strongly – it seems absolutely grounded in this strange stasis, this space of uncertainty and potential.

Vlatka Horvat (1974 in Čakovec, Croatia) works across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, video and writing. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, theatre and dance festivals and in public space. After 20 years in the US, she currently lives in London.

Endland Words & Music

26 September 2020

Following the Endland publication by And Other Stories last year I’m happy to make these spoken word plus music versions of a few of the stories available for free. They were produced in collaboration with a group of amazing musicians who’ve created soundscape musical material to accompany the readings.

The complete Endland is also available as an audiobook via Audible here. The +soundtrack audio versions shared here form part of the audiobook – while the rest of the stories get a more straightforward treatment. Do check it out. And enjoy the pieces here…. been slow off the mark sharing them what with one thing and another…

The Endland book places material from my now out-of-print, 1999 publication Endland Stories alongside more than 20 new stories, many of them previously unpublished. The new collection, a definitive Endland, with a special introduction by Jarvis Cocker, was released by And Other Stories in November 2019. Reviews have been pretty wild – Washington Post was the most recent one to cross my radar and had so many good quotes I’m reluctant to even start.

Here are the tracks:

About Lisa, with music by Bel Helicopter/Connor Kelly. Connor’s an old friend and in fact both the voice and the music for this one were done back in the early 90’s though effectively unreleased until now. I seem to remember we once did a live reading/performance of this material – possibly at The Spitz on Commercial Street, before the complete Covent Gardenifaction of Spitalfields – but not totally sure.

Shame of Shane with music by Graeme Miller. Graeme’s another old friend, a member of the long-gone Impact Theatre which was a huge influence and guiding light for Forced Entertainment back in the 80s. Graeme’s an incredible artist – his audio walk Linked for the site of the M11 Link Road is still running and is well well worth taking up if it’s available these days. He’s also got some unexpected strings to his bow – who knew that the Moomin’s movie soundtrack from 1985 was by him and collaborator Steve Shill – it’s released on the Finders Keepers label. Graeme has a new a video work with binaural sound called Wild Track circulating at present. Really worth a look if you get the chance.

Last of the First 11 with music by Kaffe Matthews. Kaffe was developing her electronics and other sound approaches back in the 90’s and collaborated with Forced Entertainment felllow-travellers Desperate Optimists (Joe and Christine Lawlor) who are now busy making films. Kaffe’s gone on to all kinds of electronic and generative music projects and our paths have crossed a few times in London – she and I did separate collaborations with choreographer Meg Stuart at Siobhan Davies studio some years back. Kaffe’s Bandcamp is here.

now not moving, with music by John Avery. Folks following Forced Entertainment’s work will know John’s music – the electronics in Real Magic were a collaboration between the two of us, and independently (without interference from me!) John created soundtracks for almost all of the Forced Entertainment performances from the early 80s to the mid 90s. You can find a lot of that work from John and other of his soundtrack pieces over at his Bandcamp here.

The Children of the Rich, with music by Aisha Orazbayeva. You may know Aisha’s violin recordings used in Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic and in the group’s recent online lockdown venture End Meeting For All – Aisha’s music is featured in episodes two and three. People may also have seen me and Aisha perform together here and there – we’ve been collaborating on improvised violin and text performances for a good few years now including gigs at LCMF and CPT in London, nyMusikk Festival (Oslo) and Bach to the Future (Antwerp). We also have an EP of our work together titled Seeping Through – you can find it here, whilst Aisha’s own solo work is here at Bandcamp.

 

Seen from Here, Writing in the Lockdown

17 June 2020

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists.

Published in a PDF format by Unstable Object, an imprint launched by Etchells and Horvat for this occasion, the book is available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity.

The writing in Seen from Here is extremely diverse – spanning (amongst other things) enigmatic fiction from Will Eaves, Eley Williams, M. John Harrison, Courttia Newland and Fernando Sdrigotti; compelling poetry from Maria Sledmere and Marvin Thompson; powerful autofiction from Lara Pawson, Season Butler and Tony White; prescient language artworks from Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Mason; and compelling performance texts from Selina Thompson, Chris Thorpe and Rupert Thomson. While some of the work reflects directly or indirectly on the lockdown experience and the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, other pieces offer glimpses of past events, other realities and fictional landscapes. All but one of the texts included in the collection are previously unpublished and most are newly written, emerging from the isolating state of the lockdown to form a hallucinatory portrait of the concerns, intimate realities and fragile fantasies of the UK in the pandemic zone of 2020.

The book can be purchased here.

Upcoming Exhibitions 2020

9 March 2020

Hearing Voices / Departure Lounge

6 March – 18 April 2020 (Closed for Easter weekend)

Tim will be presenting a new series of works including a selection of drawings and the newly
commissioned neon work ‘Kind of Stillness’ that are inspired by conversations he’s had with
local residents.

Preview 5 March 2020, 6 – 8pm.

More information here.

NO TWIST AT THE END / Ebensperger Rhomberg Vienna

7 March – 8 May 2020

Tim’s first show at Ebenspreger Rhomberg’s project space in Vienna presents a selection of
his works including the neon More Noise, drawings from his Impossible to Concentrate
series and the sculpture T.L.

Preview 6 March 2020, 6 – 9pm.

More information here.

… of bread, wine, cars, security and peace / Kunsthalle Wien

8 March – 8 May 2020

Tim is showing two new large scale neon pieces, one for the facade of the building, and two
ambitious existing works Mirror Pieces (2014) and A Message (2014) in the upcoming group
show.

Artists include: Marwa Arsanios, Zach Blas, Sonia Boyce, Banu Cennetoğlu, Alejandro
Cesarco, Saddie Choua, Phil Collins, Alice Creischer, Adji Dieye, Ines Doujak, Melanie
Ebenhoch, Tim Etchells, Kevin Jerome Everson, Forensic Architecture, Monika
Grabuschnigg, Vlatka Horvat, Anne Marie Jehle, Gülsün Karamustafa, Jessika Khazrik,
Victoria Lomasko, Hana Miletić, Marina Naprushkina, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Wendelien van
Oldenborgh, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Dan Perjovschi, Pirate Care, HC Playner, Oliver
Ressler, School of Contradiction, Selma Selman, Andreas Siekmann, Daniel Spoerri, Hito
Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Marlene Streeruwitz, Milica Tomić

Preview 8 March 2020, 4 – 10pm.

More information here.

Manchester Writing Prize 2019

21 January 2020

Tim Etchells has been selected for the shortlist of new writing as part of this year’s Manchester Writing Competition – the UK’s biggest prize for unpublished work. Devised by Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE at the start of her poet laureateship in 2008, the competition has since awarded £175,000 in prize money and helped to accelerate a number of literary careers.

Organised by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where Carol Ann is Creative Director, the competition is comprised of the Manchester Poetry Prize and Manchester Fiction Prize, with each winner receiving a £10,000 award.

This year’s Manchester Fiction Prize shortlist features Etchells alongside Elaine Chiew, Lauren Collett, Louise Finnigan, Molly Menickelly and Ian Sample.

From biting satire to experimental fiction, with stories of intense human emotion and powerful evocations of the natural world, there’s something for everyone.

Previous shortlisted writers include Alison Moore, who went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the award-winning poet Helen Mort who used her 2008 Poetry Prize money to buy a car and travel to poetry events around the country. Last year’s prizes were given to New York-based Gabriel Monteros for his story Kolkata, while British poet Molly Underwood took home the Poetry Prize for her three poems Genesis, Corinthians/ John and Song of Songs.

Chair of judges for the Manchester Fiction Prize, novelist, short story writer and editor of Best British Short Stories, Nicholas Royle, who is also Reader in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan, said: “Although it was not our intention to do so, we seem to have selected an unusually varied shortlist this year. From biting satire to experimental fiction, with stories of intense human emotion and powerful evocations of the natural world, there’s something for everyone. Stories are entered from all over the world and the short-listed half-dozen represent writing communities in the United States, Singapore, the Netherlands and Britain.”

The Fiction Prize judging panel is completed by Lara Williams, Tutor at Manchester Metropolitan and author of the acclaimed 2019 novel Supper Club, 2017 Fiction Prize winner Sakinah Hofler and Jonathan Gibbs.

The winners of this year’s Poetry and Fiction Prizes will be revealed at a gala ceremony on Friday February 7 in the atmospheric Baronial Hall at Chetham’s Library in the heart of Manchester. The event will feature readings from each of this year’s finalists before the announcement of the winners.

Endland Trailer

17 January 2020

Video trailer for my new short fiction collection Endland – shot and edited by the always amazing Hugo Glendinning, words and music by me. Text is the preface for the book. More info about the book here, buy from Forced Entertainment here.

Upcoming Exhibitions 2019

15 January 2019

Something Common / Ebensperger Rhomberg Salzburg

27 January – 9 March 2019

Tim will be showing a new larger-scale version of his neon piece ‘Something Common’ at the opening of the Ebensperger Rhomberg space in Salzburg. Preview Saturday 26 January from 6-9:30pm.

More information here.

 

Presque Rien / Geukens & De ViL Contemporary Art

26 January – 10 March 2019

Tim’s neon ‘Keep it Simple’ features in this group show at Geukens & De Vil Contemporary Art in Knokke, Belgium. The exhibition brings together artists from different generations, nationalities and disciplines around the idea of ‘(Almost) Nothingness’. The show doesn’t refer to the philosophical thought that denies meaning and value to our existence but wants to reveal – on the contrary – the value of seemingly minimalistic realisations.

More information here.

 

If it’s not meant to last, then it’s Performance / VITRINE BASEL

23 February till the 19 May 2019

Tim features in this group exhibition  alongside Paul age Boutros, Sophie Jung, Clare Kenny, Hannah Lees, Wil Murray, and Rafal Zajko. The exhibition examines a diverse group of works through the lens of performance by bringing together a group of works that utilise a broad range of materials and processes.

Tim’s work ‘Further Provocations’, comprises 45 phrases, each periodically painted onto the gallery wall before being covered over and replaced with a new line of text. First shown at TATE Modern in London, this work will be presented for the second time at VITRINE, Basel. Like urban graffiti or changing billboard texts, these words are somewhat transient – seen one day, replaced, covered or partly covered over the next, in a process that allows residual traces of the ongoing work to accumulate in place.

Preview Friday 22 February 2019, 6 – 8pm

More information here.

 

Go With The Flow / Swim Against The Tide / Camberwell Space, London

7 March – 29 March

A selection of Tim’s Fight Posters series (2012) will be shown at Camberwell Place from the 7 – 29 March 2019. The exhibition presents contemporary artworks that explore the power and economy of language to explain, coerce and subvert.

Artists in the exhibition include: Tim Etchells, Kay Rosen, Mark Titchner and Claire Undy. The show also takes the full text of Tim’s LED piece from last year With/Against as it’s title.

More information here.

 

Between Us/ Kunsthalle Mainz

15 March – 16 June 2019

Group show featuring new neon and other sculptural work from Tim alongside new work from Sissel Tolaas, Tamara Grcic, Alicia Frankovich and Søren Lyngsø Knudsen.

More information here.

 

 

Subject:Fwd:Unknown and Shown & Told

19 November 2018

Tim has new work in the show Subject:Fwd:Unknown at fffriedrich in Frankfurt, curated by the MA Curating Students at Städelschule. Tim’s section of the exhibition runs 16 November – 25 November 2018. More info about the show here.

There are also upcoming gigs for Shown & Told Tim’s collaboration with Meg Stuart, coming up in Vienna (23 and 24th November) and Gent (13 and 14 December). More info and links here.

For Everything – VITRINE London

11 October 2018
VITRINE is delighted to present a solo exhibition of work by Tim Etchells. Taking cues from its position in a busy public square, Etchells fills the unique space with a 12 metre-long neon piece that reads ‘For everything that is shown something is hidden’. The letters spelling out the phrase are only alternately illuminated, disrupting the text so that it is only partially visible on first sight. More info and images of this work here. Adjacent to and in a dialogue with the neon work, round the corner of VITRINE’s window space, Etchells presents a series of photographs taken during the protests that greeted U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the UK. Taken from amidst the marching crowd, the images document the signs that protestors carried, but, rather than the fronts, we see the reverse sides of the placards, revealing the diverse arrangements and colours of crisscrossed tape that holds them together.
More information and images of this work here.