Off the streets, graffiti is an unruly, inarticulate, inscrutable scrawl. And although it is oft considered meaningless, with Jean Baudrillard once describing it as “a kind of angular, syncopated writing that no longer says anything at all,” he also wrote that somehow, in all its nothingness, it still says something. It says, ‘I exist somewhere.’

In Misreading Misreading, several hundred of those mute graffitied forms are combined with the material logic of an inked wooden typeset, poised as though composed for a nineteenth-century printing press. The result is a staged tension between an unreadable written script and a technology whose sole purpose is to disseminate clear, reliable information, whilst the audience is positioned not just as a viewer, but a reader.

What it is that a reader does, or is capable of, however, remains relatively obscure. In modern English, we understand the word ‘reader’ to mean ‘one who apprehends the meaning of the written,’ but if we trace the term to its Old English root rǣdere, it returns a definition of the reader as a ‘diviner of riddles’— someone who intuits by guesswork, as one might interpret a dream. Riddles, of course, are poetic structures designed to lead astray; they are things with ties to allegories, oracles, paradoxes and dreams, things logic cannot always unweave. And so rather than an act of comprehending something clear-cut, this archaic definition of the reader as a ‘diviner of riddles’ positions reading as a speculative, generative, alchemical practice— something closer to misreading than reading.   

Adjacent to the installation, a set of ballpoint pen drawings re-centre the subjectivity, rather than neutrality, inherent in historical practices of ‘reading’: a pair of epigraphers study the then-believed ‘impenetrable’ Egyptian hieroglyphic language through the colonial, othering eye; a librarian offers interpretative guidance to readers; and a group of men communicate with a spirit in a nineteenth-century séance. These images, manually distorted through processes of folding and creasing, destabilise the modern idea of reading as an objective or straightforward process.

And so Misreading Misreading returns us to the uncanny human tendency to conjure meaning where none was intended, re-imagining what possibilities lie within the creative, erroneous, perhaps even prophetic role of the reader. Exploring the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when framed – or misread – as language, the exhibition establishes a speculative and poetic dialogue between an audience of misreaders and the graffiti-writing ‘someones’ who exists somewhere – a dialogue that is not entirely of this world, but not apart from it, either – and asks not whether these marks say something true, but what happens when we insist they have something to say at all.