“And finally I came up with the dates, since after all one deals with the sense or nonsense of things on a daily basis.” –Hanne Darboven, 1989

The seven booklets are filled with regular, undulating writing drawings, reminiscent of children’s school exercises. The work Untitled (Wordless) is dated July 27, 1973 and personally dedicated to Nancy Holt. The last of the writing on the dedication page reads “wordless”. This previously unseen work is part of a convolute of works Darboven dedicated and sent to Holt. The handwritten nature of the characteristic wordless writing lines seem at odds with the conceptual claim of objectifying art. However, Darboven’s writing practice is ultimately a conceptual gesture: The artist is neither concerned with an individual gesture nor the immediacy of spontaneity, but rather with a conceptual practice in which the execution is presented as such in its temporality: “I write, but I do not describe”.

Twelve photographs of the horizon line correspond to twelve separate angles of sight, a foreshadowing of what will be the views from Holt’s majestic earthwork, ​Sun Tunnels. The photographs are mounted on paper and demarcated with cardinal direction, as well as the geographical landmarks featured within them. The drawing is both a preparatory tool and an allusion to Holt’s conceptual meditations; the lines radiating from the center suggest an infinite path of sight, while the photographs fragment the view, limiting us to a constructed experience of the landscape.

From the mid-1970s her photo works turned to ever-shifting planetary cycles, explicitly seen in Sunlight in Sun Tunnels (1976) and the Light and Shadow Photo Drawings (1978). Photography enables, to use her words, “vision to be fixed” and for visual perception to be focused.

Darboven’s (Süd-) Koreanischer Kalender / (South) Korean Calendar (1991), a work based on pages from a South Korean yearly calendar. The particular graphic elements and colors in these 365 identically-framed plates and cover sheet have a rather bold, visually striking effect that is unusual for Darboven’s work. Each of the 365 calendar pages contains handwritten entries in felt-tip pen showing Darboven’s typical cross-sum calculations based on the day’s date. These are calculated by totaling up the day, month, decade, and year, then translating that total into loopy, wavy lines that resemble cursive handwriting. At the bottom of each page are the handwritten words “heute / today,” which Darboven has crossed out; the wavy lines are stricken through as well.

Like Darboven, Holt was attentive to language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. In the mid-1960s she worked as an assistant literary editor at the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, and in 1966 began creating concrete poems and text-based works of art.