Your Words or Mine? Lulwah Al Homoud

In this issue on Word-as-Art, all our featured artists, whether from New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Beirut, Baghdad, Mumbai or Cairo, are working in the English language, reflecting its cultural hegemony as a universal means of communication. Some of them, like Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, take things further by translating their work into multiple languages in different contexts. Here, we explore the cultural positioning of text in contemporary visual culture and look at how artists have de-centralized the primacy of the image by radicalizing text, turning the textual into sculptural, visual material.