Serpentine and Outernet Arts continue an innovative partnership presenting the digital artwork Silent Writings (2009/2024) by American artist Barbara Kruger, which explores how we communicate and connect with global events and with each other. It will be on view every Monday until 22nd April from 6pm to 9pm from tomorrow.

The piece weaves images and words to engage issues of control, power and dominance. Kruger incorporates her own words alongside quotes from writers and philosophers including Aimé Césaire, Goethe, Thomas Mann and Mary Therese McCarthy. These quotes touch on themes of violence, political modes of operation and spectatorship. Kruger manipulates selected words, enlarging or removing them to highlight their meanings and to create new ones. Opposing terms like contact/isolation, order/horror, stupid/clever become fluid and interchangeable.

Barbara Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London at Serpentine South in over 20 years features a unique selection of installations, moving image works, and multiple soundscapes installed across the Serpentine building, a Tik Tok effect, the bookshop, and outside banners. The exhibition remains on view until 17th March 2024.

Devoted to the exploration of visual culture and image production, Kruger is known for her work with imagery and words, frequently borrowing from the languages of advertising, graphic design, and magazines. Her practice often explores complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, and capital. She said: “It would be great if my work became archaic, if the issues that they try to present, the commentary that I’m trying to suggest was no longer pertinent. Unfortunately, that is not the case at this point.”

After spending two years at Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design in New York, Kruger began working as a designer and picture editor at the Condé Nast magazines Mademoiselle and House & Garden. Frequently borrowing from the language of advertising and graphic design, her practice often explores the complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, and capital. Her work has been shown in international art institutions and across public spaces, including installed and projected onto buildings, billboards, hoardings, cars, buses, and skate parks, and printed in newspapers.

The exhibition at Serpentine is a UK premiere of Untitled (No Comment), 2020, an immersive three-channel video installation, in which short snippets of footage found on social media platforms are accompanied by the artist’s work directly addressing viewers with questions, statements, and quotes by French philosopher and writer Voltaire and American rapper Kendrick Lamar. Footage of hairstyle tutorials, animated cats, acrobats, blurred out selfies, installation images of Kruger’s work, and gemstones mix to stress our era’s short attention spans.

Pledge, Will, Vow, 1988/2020, is a three-channel video work, recently presented at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. In this work, Kruger takes on the texts of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, traditional marriage vows, and the last will and testament.

In Untitled (Forever), 2017, enveloping the walls and floor of a gallery rarely open to visitors, Kruger assembles her words with those of others. A quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984 is installed on the floor. The rest of the area is covered with textual works, one of which finishes with the words THIS IS ABOUT YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.. The exhibition will also feature an audio chorus of greetings, emotions, and sentiments that address visitors at the entry and throughout the building. It’s spectacular!

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Images: Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell and Artwork Still, Barbara Kruger, Silent Writings, 2009/2024. Image courtesy of Outernet Arts