Wordsearch by Karin Sander.
Catalogue designed by Bryan Gee (@Bruce Mau design)
with layout assistance from associate designer Sara Dorkenwald.
Deutsche Bank Art, 2002
The catalogue is packaged in plastic box which also includes the Friday October 4th, 2002 edition of The New York Times which in turn contains the artwork itself, Karin Sander’s 8-page intervention in the business section of that paper. Wordsearch asks what languages does New York speak? Does speech embody culture? Sander found 250 New Yorkers, each speaking a different native language to contribute a unique word that had a special personal significance for them. Each of the words was cross-translated thus generating thousands of words which were then typeset using distinct scripts or faces as necessary in a miniscule point size echoing the typography of the surrounding stock pages.
The wordsearch catalogue appeared the previous Sunday as the largest non-editorial paid insert” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine’s history. I edited three visual essays that alternated with the text sections including contributions by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hilton Als and others.