Amaranth Borsuk exhibits collaborative work at Pierogi Gallery in New York

Curated by Heather and Raphael Rubinstein, the show Under Erasure takes its title from Jacques Derrida’s concept of sous rature, which posits that to put a word under erasure (sous rature) is “to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability.” The exhibition includes work by artists and writers who draw upon and obscure sourced texts. According to the curators, “Many of the works included in the exhibition, by artists such as Jenny Holzer and Glenn Ligon, utilize erasure and redaction to emphasize the political dimension of language, its coercive effects, its role in surveillance, as well as its capacity to make visible what has been marginalized, or at least register the trace of that marginalization.” IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk‘s collaboration,The Deletionist, takes part in this tradition. A Javascript bookmarklet created with Nick Montfort (MIT) and Jesper Juul (Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts) that automatically generates erasure poems from web pages, it opens a Worl in the World Wide Web, inviting us to be attentive to what is seen and what is silenced online. Under Erasure will be up at Pierogi Gallery through January 2019.