‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not recall directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you? `What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing- with a rather shaky hand- a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’ - Michel Foucault, 1969 `a labyrinth into which I can venture (a play of works by guests and foreigners)’

Joseph Kosuth’s a labyrinth into which I can venture is the most recent addition to his twelve-year series of Guests and Foreigners installations. Constructed as an enormous labyrinth, using spaces in the gallery previously unseen by the public, the installation is a self-reflexive discourse on the artist’s own history. `Quoted’ and embedded as part of the installation, are key early works through to new work created specifically for the exhibition which over all function as part of the text of Kosuth’s labyrinth.

Joseph Kosuth is one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art; initiating language and photo based works and appropriation strategies in the 1960s. His work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art.