Otto Berchem

Otto Berchem’s practice explores social and visual codes, focusing on the relationships between language, architecture, history and poetry. His conceptual based practice employs a wide variety of media, including painting, video, public interventions and other unconventional artist activities. Berchem’s interest in codes goes back to 1994’s Men’s Room Etiquette, a public intervention touching upon the unwritten codes of how men behave with other men in public toilets. With The Dating Market, a project conceived in 2000, Berchem created a series of shopping baskets with a flower motif that patrons of supermarkets could opt for, labelling themselves “available” and looking for a date. In Temporary Person Passing Through, a work for the 2005 the Istanbul Biennial, Berchem investigated the relationship between Istanbul’s street children and their movement within the city, using the visual language of Hobo Signs, a system of symbols employed by itinerant workers in the USA from the 19th to the mid 20th century. With his recent work, the artist continues his exploration of signs, human relationships and codes, to create a chromatic alphabet. Berchem’s chromatic code is inspired by the writings of Jorge Adoum and Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Saville’s designs for the first three New Order albums, and the condition of Synesthesia. Through the use of this alphabet, Berchem has proposed a series of works reviewing iconic images and creating his own documents by strategically deleting preexisting meanings and slogans, and replacing them with his interpretation of reality.