Visual Text: Finger Poem

By means of symbolic gestures, a sentence is delivered in sign language, whose wording may only be understood at the end of the performance when the camera pans over a line written on a piece of paper. This is how Sehtext: Fingergedicht defies our concepts of immediate listening and comprehension associated with both hearing and sight. If a literally physical “becoming action” of the verbal is performed, through a language of gestures – in showing by speaking and saying by showing – we can thus identify a dismantling of the hierarchy of the sensory system.
(Sabeth Buchmann)

In Visual Text: Finger Poem, VALIE EXPORT communicates with her fingers. Sign language, as an elision of word and gesture, is investigated in this performance-to-camera work. The artist writes: "The body as carrier of information, in order to convey both spiritual and physical contents, is the reflected image of the internal/psychological and of the external/institutional reality."

Text in the end: I say the showing with the signs of the legend. Martin Heidegger