Images by Aalt van de Glind

* A stop sign. A smiley face. A four-leaf clover.

Humans have always heavily relied on signs, words and images to represent their ideas, to transport meaning. In a world without symbols you would not even be able to read this text. But considering the fact that literally all verbal and nonverbal communication is based on symbols, it is fascinating how little we care about them. 

Navigating swiftly through the many interfaces of postmodern life we share and interpret all kinds of signs so naturally that it’s easy to forget that there is barely any logical connection between a symbol and the concept it represents. These seemingly self-explanatory relations between sign and signifier are in fact mere constructions and must therefore not only be learned, but also reviewed and sometimes renewed.

In their spatial installation “Unicode”, artists Anna Raczynska and Hannes Nienhüser playfully explore the realm of everyday symbolism by literally re-constructing some of these concepts in three-dimensional space.