Hanne Darboven's Address–Place and Time

In 1966 Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) moved from her native Hamburg to New York City, where she spent two formative years developing an art practice centered on the serial inscription of numerical calculations derived from the Gregorian calendar and participating in foundational exhibitions of Conceptual art. After returning to Hamburg, Darboven lived and worked in her family residence while maintaining close connections to fellow artists in New York, particularly Sol LeWitt, with whom she exchanged letters until his death in 2007. This exhibition investigates how Darboven’s art engages and reconfigures the calendar and the postal system as cultural techniques for the spatial and temporal organization of the modern world. Signs indicating her home address, Am Burgberg 26, came to figure in Darboven’s work in the 1970s, a decade when her art expanded to include the diversity of textual and pictorial materials that characterizes the works in this gallery, which incorporate personal letters, picture postcards, and illustrated news magazines. This exhibition emerged out of the interdisciplinary course Art Against Culture?, taught by Professor Brigid Doherty, in which undergraduate and graduate students explored how Darboven and other artists and writers in late twentieth-century Germany disrupted cultural norms for the representation of time and place in response to the difficulties of reckoning with recent German history.