Over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consisted of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. In this series, Chris Sharp reflects on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold, and the work engages with and plays upon the various readings and mutability of “promise”, along with the inevitability of what may come, whether positive or negative. Such polyvalence is particularly topical, as we have shifted from the anthropocentric promise of modernity to a negative faith in the post-human.

Including artists Becky Beasley, Patrick Bernatchez, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marlie Mul, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi, Antoine Nessi, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Mandla Reuter, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Francisco Tropa, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi.

Dean’s work is often concerned with the play of legibility through the creation of private lexicons. The relation between spoken word performance and its graphic representation, often in the form of private, personal and self-made typefaces, is one key to his work. The otherwise mute objects are inscribed, via clues, or fragments of lettering, with a personalised form of writing, which gives the opportunity of animating the artwork. Here the book operates as a form of sculpture, inscribed with both a personal and bodily form, to be read, spoken or carefully deciphered. Designed by Michael Dean, with Fraser Muggeridge.

‘NOW LEAVES describes leaving and having left. Glossolalia like, against noise, about the bones of a writing, written in tongue graphics legible by reason of the trees with as many words as there are leaves. The percussion of these leaves is f***ing news. The percussion of these leaves is not his news. The percussion of these leaves is not her news. The percussion of these leaves is definitely not their news.’ – Michael Dean

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership:

Dean’s work is often concerned with the play of legibility through the creation of private lexicons. The relation between spoken word performance and its graphic representation, often in the form of private, personal and self-made typefaces, is one key to his work. The otherwise mute objects are inscribed, via clues, or fragments of lettering, with a personalised form of writing, which gives the opportunity of animating the artwork. Here the book operates as a form of sculpture, inscribed with both a personal and bodily form, to be read, spoken or carefully deciphered. Designed by Michael Dean, with Fraser Muggeridge.

‘NOW LEAVES describes leaving and having left. Glossolalia like, against noise, about the bones of a writing, written in tongue graphics legible by reason of the trees with as many words as there are leaves. The percussion of these leaves is f***ing news. The percussion of these leaves is not his news. The percussion of these leaves is not her news. The percussion of these leaves is definitely not their news.’—Michael Dean