Author Description

A one-day work of art? In the business section of The New York Times? Karin Sander's Wordsearch exploits the power of the newspaper as medium--and also reproduces its ephemerality. Sander asked 250 New Yorkers, each of whom speaks a different language, to donate a world in their mother tongue--a word that holds a special personal significance. Each of the words was translated into every one of the other 249 languages in the project, for a total of 62,500 words, from which Sander fashioned a work of art analoguous to the stock market listings in the business section of the newspaper. Wordsearch thus creates not only an unusual portrait of a multicultural metropolis, but also a work that was simultaneously experienced on October 4, 2002, by millions of Times readers around the world. This catalogue consists of an original copy of the newspaper from that day plus a lengthy insert about the project that was published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine on the previous Sunday. This project was produced for Deutsche Bank's art series, Moment.