Artists Joseph Kosuth and Seamus Farrell have been invited to conceive two sites-specific works at Chelsea Space. The artists have presented similar versions of these works and installation concept on occasion of the 12th Havana Biennale titled ‘Between The Idea and Experience’ in 2015 at the historic Biblioteca National Jose Marti of Cuba. Both artists engage with the architectural and cultural context of the exhibition space showing how art is itself essentially a questioning process.
Kosuth’s installation entitled ‘(A Grammatical Remark) #11’, 2019 develops from the artist’s interest and use of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language, and a body of works referred to as Kosuth’s Wittgenstein Series begun in 1988. Through the use of an appropriated text from the renown novel Paradise, by Cuban author José Lezama Lima, famously edited by the writer Julio Cortàzar, Kosuth physically and conceptually plays on the notion of ‘punctuation and grammar’ and literally punctuates the space by creating a grammatology of his own. The presentational aspects of the installation include resurfacing the walls with a single line of silkscreened text traversing the architectural context in one continuous line. The text is articulated with white neon components forming all the points of the sentence's punctuation. For Kosuth what begins as a formal device in a shift of meaning ends in a metaphorical investigation of art’s basic agenda.