Hanne Darboven—Writing Time

A look at the artistic practice of conceptual artist Hanne Darboven and her distinctive ways of marking, as a way of marking time on paper.

Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) is best known for her immersive installations made of individually framed sheets of paper filled with handwritten tabular notations and collage images. This book examines Darboven's life and work through the lens of drawing, this concise overview organized around three key turning points in the artist's practice. First presented are Darboven’s Konstruction drawings, made during her two-year stay in New York in the late 1960s—abstract works based on strategies of horizontal traversal and mirroring. The following section describes how Darboven transformed her drawing practice into formulas that calculate specific dates and durations into a single number, which the artist presents in a variety of forms, from a series of calligraphic lines to a set of continuously drawn squares. The book concludes with a deep dive into the 1996 installation Inventions that Have Changed Our World, which records every day of the twentieth century according to Darboven’s formulas and assigns an inventor to each of the century’s ten decades, from Johannes Gutenberg to the Wright brothers, to represent each decade. This engaging overview highlights how Darboven's work offers an extraordinarily unique calculus of art and life, challenging time as a linear and objective measure.