Lorem Ipsum

The title of the exhibition, Lorem ipsum, is borrowed from the world of design and printing, referring to meaningless text used as filler text in typesetting and design planning. The term originally appeared in the dialogue De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the ends of good and evil), written by the Roman philosopher Cicero in 45 BCE. The treatise discusses Epicureanism: a philosophy that strives for inner peace and release from pain through spiritual pleasures and the search for meaning in human nature.

Lorem ipsum transformed to a design standard following the decline of Latin and as the text became void of meaning. In the nineteenth century, to test typefaces and layouts, printing houses adopted Cicero’s treatise because of its balanced visual rhythm, which resembled the distribution of the letters of modern European languages. Over time, as Latin became a language exclusively for scholars, Cicero’s words lost their meaning and turned into visual “white noise.” This is the background for the emergence of the term Lorem ipsum, which was coined accidentally when in the early twentieth century, due to technical typesetting limitations, the Latin word dolorem (pain) was truncated to lorem. With no knowledge of the language, no one could detect the error. The mistake was perpetuated and replicated, until in the 1960s, as Lorem ipsum became a graphic working tool, a random shuffling of the pages of the original treatise definitively fixed the term as gibberish. De finibus bonorum et malorum thus transformed from a poignant philosophical testament into a purely formal shell. The exhibition Lorem ipsum seeks to dwell within this disruption and to search for a grip on reality even as words lose their meaning.

Seven artists met at the juncture between collective frameworks and personal stories. They adopted organized patterns like a family album, religious ritual, digital format, bureaucratic document, or decorative element – and explored how these can bear a biography without separating content from expression. The exhibition unfolds processes of voiding, dismantling, and reorganization of the components of human identity and experience, through elements of layering. Many of the works draw inspiration from personal or historical pasts, evoking them in the present through acts of formal processing.

The exhibition sheds light on everyday structures where we move about and proposes viewing identity as a dynamic process of dismantling and reassembly, a composition that requires constant motion to remain relevant.