Five space-filling installations by Bruce Nauman (born 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana), Barbara Kruger (born 1945 in Newark, New Jersey) and Alfredo Jaar (born 1956 in Santiago de Chile) constitute the exhibition. Essential to these multimedia works are the simultaneous use of word and image, the examination of language, and the exploration of its expressive potential. In addition, these installations address various forms of violence and violent behavior.

Since the mid-sixties, the interplay of word and image has been integral to Bruce Nauman’s oeuvre, indicative of his ceaseless and subtle questioning and study of the Conditio humana. His key work of the eighties, Good Boy Bad Boy, consists of one hundred sentences that follow a precise structure of conjugation, negation, and objectivation: “I was a good boy. You were a good boy. We were good boys. That was good. … I was a bad boy. ...” Life is reduced to its essentials in this listing of everyday actions, thereby laying bare its contradictions and ambivalence.
   While the video version of Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) confronts viewers with a woman and a man reciting this litany of statements at different speeds and with different intonations, the neon version (1986/87), mounted in four columns, translates the spoken words of the video into a visual rhythm of sentences and groups of sentences flashing on and off in sequence. The pulsating blinking of the neon in different colors and typographies in combination with the urgency of the speakers’ voices and looks push the meaning of the sentences into the background and challenge viewers to question themselves.

Barbara Kruger is known for works in which she superimposes short, pithy phrases on appropriated photographs. Her provocative juxtaposition of words and pictures invests platitudes and prejudices with new meaning: “Love for sale”, “We don't need another hero”, “My body is your battleground”, etc. In the form of posters and other manifestations, her messages leave the museum and go out into public spaces where they reach a wider audience.
    For the first time in the installation Power/Pleasure/Desire/Disgust (1997), Kruger comes up with narrative and appellative sentences and dialogues, projected in rapid sequence on the walls and floor of the exhibition space. These are complemented on the front wall of the darkened room with three moving pictures of oversized faces, spewing sentences at the viewers. Their intensely emotional content ranges from rage, fear or insecurity to tenderness. Thus directly addressed, viewers are confronted with their own value systems. Kruger’s piece communicates an irreconcilable, almost resigned mood. She turns linguistic clichés and the potency of verbal aggression into a physical experience.

In Field, Road, Cloud (1997) and The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996/2000), works that are part of the larger Rwanda Project (1994-2000), Alfredo Jaar makes use of text to attract viewers’ attention and (re)activate their imagination. The three-part photo piece, Field, Road, Cloud, shows fragments of a beautiful, peaceful African countryside. This idyll is broken by small accompanying sketches that identify the scenes as the site of the genocide in 1994 of the Tutsis by the Hutus.
   Fluorescent lettering—a concise, matter-of-fact description of the political situation in Rwanda and a few brief biographical data on the protagonist, whose husband and two children were massacred—introduces visitors to Jaar’s installation, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. They meet Gutete Emerita, or rather her eyes in the form of a transparency, multiplied by the artist a million times and laid out on a gigantic light table. Gutete Emerita survived the massacre but her personal despair belies all hope. Collective and individual violence merge. It looks at us and does not let us go.