2026. BRAILLE SECTION, University of Split – University Art Gallery, Split

Anabel Zanze’s work occupies a singular space where language and image converge, where the written word takes on a pictorial life and visual form becomes a vessel of meaning, rhythm, and intellectual charge. Letters, words, and concepts inhabit her canvases as active constituent materials that shape the surface, direct the gaze, create structure and open semantic layers in ways that invite both reading and viewing at once. It is at this intersection of the visible and the expressible that the artist’s distinctive creative voice is articulated. One might therefore argue that at the core of Zanze’s practice lies a sustained and rigorous exploration of the boundary between text and image. The words that inhabit her works possess visual weight, sonic resonance and conceptual precision. They appear as traces of thought, as rhythmic signs, as compositional elements. In doing so, the artist forges a poetics of her own, in which language becomes the very substance of the image rather than a mere instrument of meaning. Her works thus unfold as intricate visual-semiotic entities, inviting the observer to trace the interplay between letter and surface, between meaning and form, between the analytical and the sensible. This approach situates the oeuvre of Anabel Zanze within important currents of analytical and conceptual art, as well as the traditions of visual and concrete poetry. Yet the image remains her central preoccupation as a space of experience, of intellectual work and of sensory concentration. Seriality, disciplined structure, reduction of form and a perpetual return to language as both origin and challenge lend her work a recognisable authorial signature. Looking across her exhibition installations or individual pieces, one discerns a certain composure in her compositional thinking: the works are constructed with discipline, almost methodically, yet remain free of rigidity and alive with an inner pulse. This predilection for sorting, sequencing and conceptually organising the visual field evokes an almost Fluxus-like kinship with the encyclopaedic gesture – an affection for to the list, the unit, the system and the catalogue – yet permeated throughout by the living nerve of existence. Discernible here, too, is a singular lexicographic sensitivity, whereby the selection of words draws as much from their semantic density as from their sonic and visual energy. (…)

(…) Within this segment of her oeuvre, the works incorporating the aforementioned tactile structures and Braille warrant particular attention. By moving from the two-dimensional plane into relief, Anabel Zanze broadens the communicative reach of her practice, drawing the experience of blind and visually impaired persons into the sphere of contemporary art. Language presents itself here at once as visual sign, tactile fact and instrument of encounter, whilst the artwork acquires a more pronounced dimension of accessibility, sensory complexity and social awareness. These works also decelerate the act of reception, guiding the observer and reader into a more attentive and concentrated relationship with the sign, the surface and the very process of deciphering meaning. These works alter the very temporality of looking and reading, perception grows slower, more attentive and more corporeally engaged, as meaning reveals itself gradually through touch, through lingering and through drawing near. A distinctive typhlological horizon of reception takes shape in the process, one in which the work demands different rhythms of reading, of approach and of the recognition of meaning. On a shallow bronze relief, for instance, the phrase My World is rendered in Braille. Even within this brief formulation, a complex web or relations opens up: between the personal and the communal, between touch and gaze, between written word as sign and written word as experience. Those who read Braille encounter the relief from within, through the tactile apprehension of meaning; those who approach it through the Latin-script label encounter it indirectly, by way of transmission, translation and interpretation. This divergence of approach softens the separation between experiential worlds, opening a space in which they may meet. My World thus sheds its quality of private possession and becomes a territory of shared presence. It is here that the work of Anabel Zanze assumes a powerful ethical and anthropological dimension. Written word emerges as one of civilisation’s most fundamental traces: the materialisation of a human need to leave something behind, to press experience into matter, to make thought accessible to another. Rendered in Braille, this trace takes on an additional density, being addressed to eye and body alike; meaning is taken in through sight, touch, movement and nearness. The relief thereby constitutes itself as a place of encounter between differing sensory regimes and differing modes of being in the world. Touch, too, is among the fundamental channels of perception, one of the most primordial ways in which the world affirms itself as proximate, real and capable of being shared. Where meaning is absorbed through the fingertips, the sign breaks free of its status as mere object of vision and becomes an event of relation. Braille thus functions both as an instrument of legibility and as a reminder that all writing, in its deepest impulse, strains towards another: to be received, recognised and drawn into a common space of experience. In this sense, My World functions as a subtle utopian gesture. The world is conceived here as a space that comes into being only through collective effort – through reading, translation, interpretation and the act of approaching another – not as a pre-existing common ground. Community is not a given; it is something constructed… It is precisely this that lends the work its quiet yet forceful political resonance, recalling that participation implies the right to presence, but is fulfilled only when the trace of the other can be recognised, read and acknowledged. (…)