ART BASEL IN BASEL

For Art Unlimited 2024, Xavier Hufkens is delighted to showcase Room with All Existing Words (2005-2024) by Mark Manders, in collaboration with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Having recently joined the gallery, Mark Manders is best known for his continuous project entitled Self-Portrait as a Building since 1986. Manders’ artistic practice departs from the idea that his work is one endless and ever-expanding self-portrait. Created over the span of nearly two decades, Room with All Existing Words is a manifestation of Manders’ longstanding interest in language in visual forms, explored through the incorporation of everyday objects.

The work features a monumental painting consisting of twenty large cabinet doors which could conceivably form four walls of a room. In front of the painting sits the Novelist Lounge Chair, a chair crafted from fake, notional newspapers that contain every existing English word. The stickers on the doors of the room simultaneously reference a singular word from the entirety of the English language: skiapod. An obscure and seldomly used word, which is also associated with a failed myth. Previously, only a few images of skiapods had existed, which provided Manders the opportunity to alter the myth’s meaning and to create a fabricated history for this word, replete with numerous fictitious images and content interwoven into our history.