Barbara und Gabriele Schmidt Heins

The concept artists Barbara and Gabriele Schmidt Heins deal with the subject of time in their photographic and textual readymades. Words, phrases, sentence fragments from newspapers and magazines are brought together with pictorial material to form a new artistic context. The objects and installations of the sisters repeatedly focus on ambiguous meanings; opening up language and that can be experienced in a space created through text. The artistic use of language is materially represented and understood through text; however, speech and text remain distinct. It is not the presence of phonetic script that is relevant; rather it is the absence of presence that leaves textual traces and evokes memories.