Fia Backström

Dachshund tax-assessment. The artist Öyvind Fahlström used that phrase (Tax-Taxering in the original Swedish) in his 1953 Manifesto for Concrete Poetry to express the possibility of a new kind of writing based on the associative play of words that had been previously ignored. Fia Backström’s text on aluminum plaques (Post-Sensitive Rhetorics, 2011) extend Fahlström’s provocation into contemporary advertising slang, political euphemism, and media innuendo that put word play to work. Clipped and cryptic, her verses take direct inspiration from the pseudo-poetry of HSBC’s “Different Values” ad campaign, which was recently collected by MoMA—a bizarre if befitting post-script. Alongside this work are two Fahlström prints from 1966 and 1973, whose prescience—in form and content—about the interactions between language and mass media make them as contemporary.