The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection and the Internet. Jenny Holzer wrote texts herself for a long time between 1977 and 2001. However since 1993, she has been mainly working with texts written by others. Some of these are literary texts by great authors such as the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Henri Cole (USA), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Fadhil Al-Azawi (Iraq), Yehuda Amichai (Israel) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine).
She also uses texts from totally different contexts, for example passages from de-classified US Army documents from the war in Iraq. For example, a large LED work in the exhibition presents excerpts from the minutes of interrogations of American soldiers who had committed human rights violations and war crimes in Abu Ghraib. Here, what was once secret becomes public. Holzer's works often speak of violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death. Her main concern is to enlighten, bringing to light something thought in silence and was meant to remain hidden.
I have been aware of Holzer's work for a while now since looking at examples of her work a few years ago. At first sight, I dismissed her work seeing at as too minimalistic, 'anyone can project some text onto a building'. I suppose it was the context of the text which I should have thought about. As a developing photographer/artist her work begins to make more sense to me now. It is as if she is publicly expressing her opinion by using light to not only show the text, but when projected onto the buildings each one has a different characteristic look. The choice of text becomes important to the location, although most of the work I have seen has been in London. Projecting this text into a busy location like London would be enough to make people think and stop, and to maybe actually read the words being said. It's a statement in itself that words need to be this big for people to stop and care.
