Language is one of the central media in the work of the Spanish artist Ignasi Aballí. For the launch of the new Billboard by KÖR Wien at Praterstern, the artist has installed the word combination ‘NON EXISTENT UN IMAGINABLE IN VISIBLE’ in a position clearly visible from afar, against the backdrop of the Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel. In a location where between 150,000 and 200,000 people pass through every day, the artist distils the ambivalent nature of a city and its inhabitants into just a few words, opening up maximum scope for reflection on the questions of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility.

Walking from Praterstern to the Kaiserwiese in the Prater, one looks directly at the billboard, which, at a height of just over six metres, frames FLUCC – an institution of the Viennese music scene that has long since made a name for itself as a cultural centre. With this format, KÖR builds on the Viennese tradition of ‘language art’ and, in collaboration with FLUCC, establishes a public space for art that works with language as an independent medium – whether understood, in the tradition of the “Wiener Gruppe”, as visual and acoustic material, or as an instrument of activism.

Ignasi Aballí, who represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2022, uses a wide variety of media – including painting, object art, photography, literature, film and video – to explore the contrasts that define our relationship with the world, be it reality and fiction, the material and the immaterial, or the visible and the hidden. Three or Six Words is a work created for Vienna, which Ignasi Aballí subtly and naturally weaves into the city’s everyday life, emerging from Praterstern over the next six months: attentive flâneurs will encounter the words in various locations across Vienna.