Six Ghosts Spell Unknown Alphabet

For the summer of 2014, ‘Six ghosts spell unknown alphabet’ was on exhibition at Tegnerforbundet (Drawing Association) in Oslo, Norway. This was a collaborative, postal-art project between six artists: Jim Holyoak and Matt Shane (Montréal), Cathrine Dahl and Ørjan Aas (Trondheim), Ola Jonsrud (Oslo) and Gowara Minsa (Berlin). The artists made unfinished drawings, and mailed them to each other, between: Sunnfjord, Trondheim, The Hague, Salt Spring Island, Montréal, Toronto, Hønefoss, Oslo and Berlin. The title for this exhibition originated from the first sentence of a game of ‘Cadavre exquis’ played between Catherine Dahl and Jim Holyoak during a residency at the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (NKD), in Norway. The sentence inadvertently describes the role of chance and lost individuality in collaborative creation, as well as drawing as a common but non-spoken language. These drawings converged at Tegnerforbundet, where they swarmed and crawled up the walls. Added together in untold sequence, they spell our shared, but unknown alphabet.