Eine Katastrophe hält was aus / A Walking Catastrophe Can Put Up with a Lot

In the Beginning Was the Word. In the Beginning Was the Image.

To create her word compositions, Eva Noack (born 1977 in Cottbus; lives and works in Berlin) uses headlines and pictograms from magazines that she finds on exchange platforms or in antiquarian bookshops. An extensive search and continuous engagement precede the emergence of the artist's themes; she extracts these from magazines and creates collages on paper. The genesis of the text-image in Noack's works is comic and light but simultaneously pursues a profound narrative. She creates her works bilingually-for this purpose, the artist invited the translator Lillian M. Banks to translate the collages into English. Once a translation is finished, Noack finds the corresponding pictograms and thereby executes a type of retranslation. She passes this version back to Banks, who has translated texts by Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann for theater. The intriguing interconnection between the original text, the translation, and the pictorial retranslation ultimately results in a two-part diptych collage; her work highlights the relationship oscillating between authorship, word, and image.

This book presents seventy double collages and reveals the collaboration for the first time. With a text by the translator Lillian M. Banks.