For several decades now, the artist Axel Malik has been engaged in a continuous writing process that challenges our notions of meaning and significance in a special way. Without ever repeating themselves, his characters fill the pages of books, adorn walls and surfaces of all kinds. They charge spaces with atmospheres and invite viewers to immerse themselves in a dynamic written environment that is illegible but not illegible. What do these signs refer to, which, strangely familiar, seem to address us and at the same time elude us? Are they the adequate expression of an inner movement and bring to light what would otherwise remain hidden in the human being? Or do they form the text of the overlapping history(ies) of a space that they describe? They may not reveal their secret and yet they constantly invite us to trace it.

For the opening of GEHEIMNIS 3, Axel Malik transforms the foyer of the Theater an der Ruhr into a writing space that unfolds its very own network of relationships between the location, architecture, occasion and visitors. This process continues with another live writing scene the following evening in the open air and finally culminates in a performative writing encounter in which individual pieces of writing are created for individual visitors. read less