M HKA Ensembles

Installation, variable dimensions.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK5271).

For the Initiatief ’86 exhibition in Ghent (1986), Guy Rombouts and Monica Droste from Warsaw created the monumental, room-filling work Events that harden into the object we are sitting on and abstract nouns that acquire the solidity of a table. The title is a quote from [Stefan Themerson](http://www.themersonarchive.com/index.htm), the British composer, poet, writer, film-maker and philosopher of Polish origin. The quote is also literally a part of the installation. The typeface used for this was one that Rombouts had developed and which he was to perfect and make use of together with Droste in the years that followed. In their ‘Azart’, each letter is designed by means of a specifically designated linear figure, from the A, which is ‘angular’, to the Z, which becomes ‘zigzag’. Written in this way, words are again able to form an organically delineated entity, whereby the first and last letter are always linked together. The quote itself was written down this way on chairs; the tables are English nouns, starting with ‘absurdity’; the blackboard says ‘événements’ in French.