Leros

In September 2018, Kunsthalle Darmstadt showed five almost identical large-format pencil drawings by Klaus Mosettig. Their subject: the ink-stained surface of a table in a Greek reception camp for refugees. This is where the port authority took the fingerprints of refugees arriving from Turkey. The Viennese art historian Catharina Kahane discovered this table when she was working as a refugee worker on the island of Leros and sent photographs of its surface to Mosettig. The striking traces on the table—an unintended picture created by the refugees and port police, which the artist now „remakes“—are reminiscent of abstract expressions; they emerge from the artist’s disappearance in his work. Mosettig intensifies the incalculable human and political catastrophe in his meditative activity. This publication documents the series of drawings and the limited edition prints Negative Handwriting.