Becket MWN

Fragments
2021

Series of eight concrete poems
Spray paint on wall
Digital files for eight vinyl stencils
Approx. 35 x 50 cm each
Edition 10 + 2 AP
Eu 2.200 (excluding VAT)

The poems need not all be placed together, but can be scattered around a space; however, the order of the poems (from 1-8) must be preserved. For private use, one may choose to place only one or a few poems in a space.

Becket MWN
Born in 1984, USA
Lives and works in Amsterdam, NL

Becket MWN is an Amsterdam-based writer and artist. His installation, audio works, and performances often take language as their medium, but communication is not their goal. Rather, they engage with the construction of meaning as a process and a practice to open up aspace for thought. Often beginning with a core image, text, or event, his works unfold to pursue new lines of thought. Recent projects have focused on the relation between language and subjectivity; architecture and media; and mimesis and doubling.

His writing is published under the name Becket Flannery. He writes in the paratextual spaces of the exhibition context, the points where art is framed and interpreted, about art and the role of text in relation to artworks and exhibitions. His approach to art writing ranges from critical and interpretive essays to experimental writing, fictive modes, and performative gestures. He is currently an editor at the Netherlands-based art criticism platform Tangents.

Fragments is a series of eight concrete poems that interrelate fragmentation and time in language, archaeology, and the body. Painted directly on the wall, the texts have specific material quality and are embedded in their context. The series begins by discussing a work by the Roman poet Catullus, and the corruption or drift of certain words as the text was hand-copied over the centuries. The shapes of the poems are based on glass vessels found in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne, which were often used to transport perfumes and other substances to treat or adorn the body. The transportation of these ephemeral and fragile materials becomes a way to speculate on what happens when pieces of language, artifacts, and the body detach and return as unfamiliar objects, and what freedom that may bring.