List Projects

Lina Viste Grønli’s exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts transform ordinary pieces of furniture into the visual form of an E, the most common one in the English language.

by Lina Viste Grønli, <i>Genius of Language</i>, 2015, book, kitchen utensils, and mussel shells. Courtesy the artist, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Photo: Jonathan Sachs
  • 07 August 2015
  • Cambridge

Through mediums that include sculpture, photography, collage, and writing, Lina Viste Grønli investigates the tensions between physical things and abstract systems, particularly those of linguistics and philosophy.

With considerable humor, and using everyday objects and materials, she considers categories that have been historically opposed – such as the intelligible and the sensible, words and things, the systematic and the arbitrary – and interprets the excess or remainder that is uncontained by these binary structures.

Lina Viste Grønli, <i>Big Ear</i>, 2013, wood, oil, and marble. Courtesy the artist and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Photo: Malle Madsen
Top: Lina Viste Grønli, Genius of Language, 2015, book, kitchen utensils, and mussel shells. Courtesy the artist, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Photo: Jonathan Sachs. Above: Lina Viste Grønli, Big Ear, 2013, wood, oil, and marble. Courtesy the artist and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Photo: Malle Madsen

Viste Grønli’s exhibition for List Projects takes as its starting point the letter E, the most common one in the English language. A number of the works transform ordinary pieces of furniture—a table, a bookshelf, a corkboard—into the visual form of an E. She plays with a tenet of structural linguistics, namely that the relationship between signs and the sounds they designate is arbitrary. A photograph, for example, depicts a person performing the sound-shape of the letter E using Eurythmy, a movement art developed by Rudolf Steiner in the 1930s. The titles of these works that physicalize the letter E also use words that begin with the letter E, such as Entropy, Eggplant, Ebola, Effrontery, and English, forming something of an “E-Poem.”

Lina Viste Grønli, Dictionary, 2015 book and mussel shells. Courtesy the artist, Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Photo: Jonathan Sachs

However, the artist interrupts her system of Es with assemblies of everyday objects bearing no evident connection to the letter. Mussel shells, kitchen utensils, and an apple are adhered to or rest upon books, such as Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Playing with the systematic and the arbitrary, these juxtapositions are generated through a method she calls “thinging,” borrowing a neologism philosopher Martin Heidegger used to inflect the noun “thing” into an action, such that these sculptures manifest the material and linguistic acts that allow them to exist.


until October 25, 2015
Lina Viste Grønli
List Projects
curated by Alise Upitis
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames St E15, Cambridge

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