*1962, Tel-Aviv. Lives in Berlin and Brussels.
Scenario data (War and Peace in the dictionary), 1998 (mixed media)
Eran Schaerf's intervention is based on a poetic linguistic experiment. The artist has asked each of the three curators as well as the coordinator of Manifesta 2 to translate in front of a camera an English text he has specially written for the purpose. Thus Eran Schaerf's text has generated eight versions recorded in German, English French, Italian, Luxembourgish, Flemish, Russian and Swedish. The text is a prose poem about a man sitting in a train and about the press clippings he holds.
Eran Schaerf is a German artist of Israeli origin living in Berlin and Brussels. He attracted international attention in the beginning of the 1990s. His work develops in the intervals between sculpture, installation, conceptual art and poetry. It is characterised by a strong sensitiveness which, similar to Felix Gonzalez-Torres's works, lends his rather simple arrangements a high emotional density.
His installation for Manifesta 2 is composed of several elements and refers to the multicultural linguistic situation of the artist himself, of the participants of this international exhibition as well as of the inhabitants of Luxembourg.
Musée national d'histoire et d'art
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