Berlin, December 12, 2002
Artists: Jenny Marketou and Do-Ho Suh
In their second curatorial co-operation, the leading German weekly Die Zeit publishes Christmas gift paper designed by two cutting-edge contemporary artists, selected by Robert Punkenhofer: Do-Ho Suh and Jenny Marketou. In Suh’s contribution, the relationship between the individual and the collective is a central issue. His Christmas paper uses repetition and subtlety in a most challenging way. From distance, the reader/viewer can only see an abstract color field in green, white and red. Only upon closer inspection do little blurred dots turn into hundreds of individual faces. The attention of the reader is being manipulated between the isolated “I” and the unified “We”. Marketou on the other hand, created a specific database of Holiday smells that she graphically converted into colors. Each square distills a virtual smell into color. This graphic description of our collective memory is unique but very essential for a medium such as a newspaper, through which we communicate and inform ourselves about important issues of our daily lives. After all, not only Christmas but also newspaper itself has been identified by the smell of its newsprint.
