Eric Ellingsen
Watch Words
10. July – 25. September 2015

The Kunstverein Arnsberg is pleased to present the solo exhibition of the American artist, architect and poet Eric Ellingsen.

What connects Arnsberg with New York via Ethiopia or China with Chicago? ‘Watch Words’ connects thoughts as a line in space, as it were: a rope is tied to an object in the historic city centre, stretched out into a line, twisted again and again until this line becomes a ball or node and conserves a tremendous energy within itself. In Ellingsen's exhibition, his works repeatedly bring together the unthinkable.

His mental line twists a rope into a poetic line, lets us wander along paths or speak in unknown languages. Ellingsen's linguistic experiments unite poetry and practice, while his spatial perception constantly seeks new dimensions of experience. However, it is not the space or the word that is at the centre of his work, but the human being with all his flights of thought that break through the rational course of everyday life.



In the United States, Watch words are words that are watched by Homeland Security. Certain words trigger certain lines of suspicious thought. These are words suggesting dissident associations, like PORK. Today, the three groups of people that pay the most attention to words and the contexts in which words gain meaning, are government surveillance groups, lawyers and poets. We listen in on each other more than we listen to each other. What does it mean to be in your language today? What do you watch out for? Who watches out for you? What do you watch?

Eric Ellingsen is a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2009 to 2014 he was co-director of the Institute for Spatial Experiments at the Berlin University of the Arts. His practice Species of Space (SOS) is based on the intersections of art and architecture, poetry and public space.