ARNO

Jenny Holzer is celebrated for her thought-provoking and socially engaged practice, which spans a variety of mediums including text-based installations, projections, sculpture, and public interventions. A key aspect of Holzer’s art is her versatile use of language as a means of communication, critique, and reflection on contemporary issues. Her aphorisms, Truisms and Inflammatory Essays—characterized by simple, straightforward yet profound phrases and statements—weave together poetic reflections on war, politics, social justice, and sexual violence. They give voice to a kind of composite persona in which the artist shifts between different identities to create and offer a possible notion of the self as conditioned by power structures.

Holzer’s writing’s psychological and political realities are not easy to bear and appear even more challenging and persistent when carved in stone, as in ARNO, which consists of a poetic text engraved into two marble benches. The text composition is derived from Holzer’s first projection work, ARNO (1996), originally projected on the banks of the Arno River in Florence for a fundraising project for AIDS research and subsequently serving as the foundation for iterations in various media, such as LED columns and marble sculptures. Arno, which began as an account of losing a loved one to AIDS, contrasts everyday observations of the beloved with the grief over theirs and death. Although written in the first- person voice, it captures the universal themes of intimacy, death, and despair in quiet, lamenting lines of two to four words. Holzer wraps her language in minimalist uncertainty to elicit both compassion and tension in the viewer.

Through the medium of marble benches, the private and the ineffable are physically placed under public scrutiny. She thus proposes a form of public art whose primary purpose is to provoke engagement with the intimacies of human experience and reflect on our shared responsibilities.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)