The Written Art Collection mourns Dr. Thomas Kellein
April 12, 1955 – September 22, 2025
Dr. Thomas Kellein, our curator and artistic director, passed away in Berlin after a serious illness.
With subtle sensibility, sharp vision, and analytical intellect, he shaped the Written Art Collection – transforming script within images into a hybrid visuality. His ideas continue to build cultural bridges in an increasingly tense world.
We have lost a dear friend, an extraordinary curator, an international exhibition organizer, the author of groundbreaking publications, a passionate museum director, a discerning scholar – and an inspiring human being whose ideas will accompany us into the future.
In deep mourning
Written Art Collection
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Written art involves writing and imagery, calligraphic and conceptual art \\ Here, we are currently featuring Etel Adnan, On Kawara, Shirin Neshat and Qiu Zhijie \\ Welcome!
Shirin Neshat (born 1957 in Qvazvin, Iran) is currently the best-known Iranian artist. She grew up in a liberal Muslim family. During the Shah's rule, she went to the USA as a schoolgirl, accompanied by her sister. When she returned to Iran for the first time in 1990, the political changes in her country triggered a cultural shock in her. The Islamic Republic did not allow Neshat to stay in her homeland. New York became her diaspora.
You can take an Iranian out of Iran, but you cannot take Iran out of an Iranian.
Neshat’s stylistic feature from 1993 onwards is the use of calligraphic writing on the skin of her photographic subjects. The handwritten script on the photographic paper creates a spiritual picture plane. Her portrayals of Iranian women in particular have attracted great international attention. Starting in 1996, in addition to the photos inscribed in Farsi, she also produced black and white videos and, later, films in collaboration with her partner, the Iranian filmmaker Shoja Azari. Almost all of her works involve narrative commentary, often surreal and highly political, on her homeland.
Neshat’s themes are Iranian poetry, the spirituality of rituals, and gender segregation in fundamentalist Islamic societies. In 1999 she won the ›Golden Lion‹ for her films at the 48th Venice Biennale. In 2009 she was honored with the ›Silver Lion‹ for her film ›Women Without Men.‹ In 2017 she received the ›Praemium Imperiale‹ in Tokyo for her previous work. The portrait series ›The Home of My Eyes,‹ which was commissioned in 2015, shows people from Azerbaijan, a country situated between Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Far East. They are wearing dark clothes in their portraits. Their hands are folded at the request of the artist. Calligraphy in Farsi covers their skin. The texts deal with the question of how the subjects of the portraits feel about the term ›home.‹
Neshat’s photos feature calligraphy in Farsi. The words start precisely at the hairline. You have to get close to the persons depicted in the photos to decipher the writing. It consists, in part, of verses from an epic poem by Jamal al-din Nezami Ganjavi, one of Iran’s most renowned poets, about love and life in a diaspora. Many Iranians can still recite parts of this poem by heart.
In 1963, the Japanese artist On Kawara (1932 – 2014) was one of the first to produce art with writing according to strict conceptual guidelines. In the 1950s in Japan he was still working figuratively. With the words ›Nothing, Something, Everything‹ a change was set into motion. Since then, he has evoked ideas of time and human existence with letters and numbers. These were left unexplained. They were painted or printed on paper with a typewriter or stamp.
I am still alive
Beginning in January 1966, On Kawara produced thousands of so-called ›Today‹ pictures, on which only the date can be seen. Before painting, after priming, he masked off the numbers and letters, mixed the paint and applied it in many glazes. The work had to be finished by midnight. One of the rules he imposed on his art and its reception was that throughout his life he refused to give biographical information, thus leaving the appreciation and interpretation of his strategy to others.
The hallmark of Kawara’s work is seriality. In addition to the ›Today‹ or ›Date‹ paintings, he produced the series of works titled ›I Went,‹ ›I Met,‹ and ›I Read,‹ from 1968 to 1979, in which he added the current date to city maps and newspaper clippings he had read. He also recorded the names of people he had met. Starting in 1970, he sent out telegrams with the recurring message: ›I am still alive. On Kawara.‹ In addition, date- and time-stamped postcards were circulated. In 1971, he exhibited ›One Million Years‹ for the first time. The numbers of years reaching up to one million were written line by line on paper and presented in ring binders. The sequence bore the dedication: ›for all those who have lived and died.‹ Beginning in 1980, he produced ›One Million Years‹ projected in the direction of the future and dedicated ›to the last one.‹ The very extensive sequence of numbers was read publicly several times from 1993 onwards.
On Kawara’s ›Today Paintings‹ belong to the inventory of the most significant works of art since the 1960s. The paintings are political and private and are the result of a decision to concern himself with the history of the human species in a hermetic yet accessible way, without any highflown language. Kawara’s work has been published many times, and he designed a large number of the books himself. In place of biographical information, he always preferred to be known by an indication of the days during which he had lived.
›Mapping,‹ says the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie (born 1969) – meaning the design and artistic representation of maps – is one of his most important activities. He has already executed hundreds of ›maps,‹ not one of which solely depicts an existing world. Themes and research are his principal focus. Qiu is a trained calligrapher who relates writing and images, the Chinese and English languages, to fictional landscapes. His commissioned work ›24 World Maps‹ is an attempt to reflect upon all areas of human knowledge.
I am excited of this huge project, giving me the feeling of working for the history.
Qiu, who initially taught as a professor in Hangzhou, now heads the experimental arts faculty at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His ›24 World Maps,‹ which thematize areas of knowledge such as sociology and psychology, religions, deities and utopias as well as questions of human health and nutrition, form an encyclopedia of what he called ›All of the Objects‹ in his first exhibition.
Qiu’s teaching evolved from Chinese literature and calligraphy. He is interested in ›Total Art,‹ a Confucian idea of installation art based on knowledge, associations, writing, object making and performance. One of his early works was the thousandfold copying of the famous Orchid Pavilion Preface, a calligraphic work dated 353 AD. that is known to all Chinese artists. The original work treats of the transient, contemplative, beautiful memory of a fictional communal gathering in spring. The constant overwriting of the same calligraphy ended with a single profoundly black sheet of paper. For more than twenty years, Qiu has presented new works in both the West and the East at major biennials and in leading art museums. He sees his work as a contribution to the awakening of awareness.
Since my early childhood, creating maps was my passion. In middle school, I enjoyed a competition to assemble a map with all 32 provinces of China as fast as I could. I remember doing that in less than 30 seconds – I was the first in class. During my art college education, I had the highest score in geography upon entering, other than most of the other kids.
Etel Adnan’s visual works feature suns, moons and luminous colors. Her roots as a writer and artist are Lebanese; she grew up in Arab Beirut with Greek and Turkish as her first languages. Her poetry is clear and haunting; it is also political. The texts in her fold-outs stand for what can be said – but she anchors the written words in the inexpressible domain of bright colors. She studied at the Sorbonne, Berkeley and Harvard, which is why she writes in Arabic, French and English. For a long time she lived in Sausalito, California, where she also began to paint.
My life, I told you, is a ripped-up truck.
Adnan’s colors are bright. For her, they are signs, they represent the quintessence of emotion. Her language is terse. Her works on paper and canvas remain small. Her texts, on the other hand, often treat of wars, and of human reactions extending from despair to love. She is continuously concerned with the diversity of cultures. She is aware that the possibility of resolving grave differences between human beings is very often limited. Nevertheless, says the artist, her work exudes peace.
Adnan experienced the coexistence of different cultures in an Arab environment. Her Muslim father was highly educated. He worked for the military. He knew the Koran by heart. Her mother was raised in the Greek Orthodox faith with its prayers and hymns. In 1950 in Paris, Adnan came into contact with Jean-Paul Sartre and, for the first time, with Western philosophy, art and literature. Her artistic career, which also included journalistic work and university teaching, thus brought about a continual enlargement of knowledge and feeling. As her studies have mainly centered on the history of Europe and Asia before and after the First World War, her work investigates the causes and the scope of serious conflicts. She is well aware that all cultures involve violence. This propensity is now leading the western nations and the Arab peoples to inflict harm on each other. Adnan conveys insight into important historical events in a uniquely universal poetry.
As a writer, Etel Adnan, born in 1925, has been part of the canon of world art since documenta 13 in 2012. Her hand-written fan-folds with accessible texts and luminous colors are several meters wide, but they appear fragile. Very clear words stand next to starkly colored, almost childlike images.
