Section 3

The Manuscripts series, embarked upon in 1974, holds pride of place within Niki Kanagini’s body of work. The series is built around a deep-rooted and enduring preoccupation: the systematic interrogation of writing as a visual act. The artist approaches writing not as a vehicle for meaning but as a realm of gesture, rhythm, and materiality, to develop a personal, non-readable form of visual language. According to the poet Manto Aravantinou, “Kanagini’s painted manuscripts offer up an opportunity for communication that is both seductive and mysterious, the tenor of which lies beyond the alphabet and precedes syntax.” Kanagini divides these works into Manuscripts, where abstract compositions dominate, and Illustrated Manuscripts, where her writing exists alongside recognisable figurative forms. What she describes as her “obsession” with the notion of writing “as a symbol of recording human thought” can be traced all the way back to early works created during her student years in London, where her engagement with the modernist, typographic, and experimental approaches of the time laid the groundwork for her later linguistic explorations. As she herself notes: “I find a plaque of hieroglyphics and a modern neon sign equally fascinating.”