BASEL.- In a magnificent television interview—shared with me by Istanbul-based artist Dilek Winchester—the Egyptian historian Nawal El Saadawi says when she hears the phase “Middle East” she becomes upset. “Middle to whom?” she screams. Countries like Egypt, she explains, were called the “Middle East” relative to Britain, while India became the “Far East.” With her very characteristic sharpness she adds: “When I go to London, I say I go to the Middle West, [...] and when I go to the United States I am going to the Far West.” The audience in the live broadcast laughs at her comment. She replies that this laughing is colonialism and that nobody laughs when hearing “Middle East.” Living in the awareness of power conditions that have devastating consequences for our social organization, for our social behaviors, is living in a wound. The wound as the permanent and growing pain that is eroding our capacity to act according to the premise of safeguarding all human lives and human rights. A wound that is weakening to death the remaining democratic systems and values. A wound that is affecting the agency of the public versus the private greed. A wound that is making people accommodate the language of hate and self-defense and preservation. The wound that ignites a nihilistic flare that no one knows how to stop.
Winchester, who has always been devoted to the research of language and the development of multiple alphabets in the Anatolian and Balkan regions, has created a new, site-specific installation around that word “wound” for der TANK—The Wound is Our Place is her first solo exhibition in Switzerland. It develops from a cartographic arrangement of letters, situated on the surface of the glass cube architecture of der TANK, derived from multiple Balkan writing systems. The smaller inscriptions present transliterations of the word “the” across a range of alphabets historically and culturally associated with the Balkans, including Arabic, Armenian, Berat, Cyrillic, Elbasan, Glagolitic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Todhri and Vithkuqi. On the windows we also see a rare combination of letters belonging to different alphabets. Here, Winchester refers to “wound” by transcribing each sound phonetically. It unfolds as a sequence of hesitant and fractured utterances—“WVVWUOUVOUWUUNNNNNNNNNDNDNDDDDD”—evoking the effect of slowed speech, stammering or the inability to fully grasp what we are saying. Inside, on the only wall of der TANK, is a large inscription—with the focus on the words “the wound”. In Winchester’s installation letters pose alone, without the duty to form a word or words we would recognize. Instead of adhering to conventional orthography, the transcription follows a gradual disintegration of sound. Actually, while her work is saying “wound,” the tongue spoken by the letters is blind to its meaning. Letters are funny—they contribute to creating words, words that should have meaning and a meaning that should be adding sense to this world. However, letters one by one dismantle semantic meaning reducing language to rhythm, breath and phonetic rupture. Through repetition, elongation and distortion, language becomes heavy and unstable, as though the word itself were struggling under the burden of historical and emotional weight. The artist therefore shifts attention from semantic clarity toward the physicality of pronunciation, exposing language itself as vulnerable, fractured and unable to perform the effect we would like it to have.
Winchester’s work for der TANK is inspired by Emmanuel Zakhos-Papazahariou’s essay Babel balkanique: Histoire politique des alphabets utilisés dans les Balkans (Balkan Babel: A Political History of the Alphabets Used in the Balkans) (1972). There he examines the political and cultural history of writing systems in the Balkans, arguing that alphabets function not merely as linguistic tools but as markers of religion, power and identity. The text examines how seven major alphabets—Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin—circulated across the Balkans and were used to write many different languages and dialects beyond those for which they were originally developed. The alphabet is not tied to a culture or to a language, but it has been historically used to carry meanings that many different cultures produced. What made everything change then? Nationalism. The author shows how modern nationalism changed the role of alphabets. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emerging nation-states pushed for one official language and one official script, gradually erasing local alphabets and mixed writing systems and multilingual traditions in order to build more unified national identities.
Winchester’s work is both ecological and deeply political. Ecological, because she wants to restore the bio-diversity of the codes and methods historically developed to talk and to transmit, not from inside a culture but between different cultures. And political, because she uses and focuses on the symbolic forms of alphabets to hold to the right of existence, and the radical need to develop cultural and political forms of organization that preserve the complexity of these different religious, cultural and social orders.
We first need to accept and deal with a history shaped by cultural struggle, translation, disappearance and survival, in order to be able to create a political order capable of responding to it.
—Chus Martínez
The Special Opening on Wednesday 17 June 2026 from 6 to 9 pm takes place as part of Art@Dreispitz on 17 June 2026, from 4 pm, with Atelier Mondial, HGK Basel FHNW with CIVIC and der TANK, HEK, Kunsthaus Baselland Freilager-Platz / Helsinki-Strasse, Dreispitz, Basel/Münchenstein.
