The Word For World Is Forest

On Thursday 5 May 1646 presented a background evening with Dunja Herzog.

During the evening Dunja Herzog drove into the world of Susanne Wenger, a strong inspiration for her then-current exhibition in 1646. Via excursions to neuroscience, the Goetheanum, and possibly post humanism, Herzog talked about the work of Susanne Wenger, showed some images, presented music and other influences from Wenger, to try and get a deeper understanding of her and her work.

The invitation to participate in Attempts to Read the World (Differently) offered an opportunity for Dunja Herzog to connect to the work of the Austrian born artist and Yoruba priestess Susanne Wenger (1915-2009). Wenger devoted most of her life to the preservation, revival, and promotion of the cultural heritage of the Yoruba culture in Nigeria. She worked together with other artists on the restoration of Yoruba shrines in the forest groves where the shrines, nature and her own sculptures all became part of this sacred environment. The fusion of art and religion is at the core of Wenger’s art and she saw it as her purpose to protect the sacredness of nature. Still using a modernist mode of art construction for her reinventions in Yoruba tradition, Wenger merged her holistic worldview into her ‘archisculpture’, which she no longer regarded as autonomous sculpture but as a translation of the messages of the Yoruba deities.

The exhibition The Word For World Is Forest was part of Attempts to Read the World (Differently), a program developed by Stroom Den Haag, in collaboration with the artists Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Céline Condorelli, Dunja Herzog and Neïl Beloufa. They took first steps in a different reading, interpretation and imagining of the world, the recalibration of a navigation system in the midst of a change of era, the search for new forms of knowledge, information and communication.