Katja Davar, dazzling debt

The publication Dazzling Debt documents two complementary exhibitions, How the Mind Makes Forever at the Galerie der Stadt Backnang and Currency Galore at Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf. Katja Davar has availed herself of cuneiform script in a series of works which, along with their formal beauty and as an abstract system of signs, also reveal their inherent property and ability to connect markedly different and complex worlds; Mesopotamia, nineteenth-century industrial design, post-war modernism and digital code. Based on pictograms, the cuneiform system of writing did not serve to convey complex messages but to schematically represent agricultural production and was one of the first developments of societal bureaucracy at a time when economic development was unfolding and money was still unknown as currency. Davar examines the way in which the individual wedges react as minimal elements of the cuneiform script when used artistically and what meanings they can generate within the reference systems of contemporary art. The publication also documents a series of works in which Katja Davar fuses associative sequences of currency symbols and abstracted landscape elements as well as the tree diagram motif which runs through her work like a golden thread. With the essays: Unsecured Trust. Money – Ornament – Art, by Ilka Becker and In the Eternal Vortex by Florian Wüst.