The LED displays a moving message with various combinations of the three words YOU ARE WHY. The dictum YOU ARE WHY, not only poses the most fundamental of existential questions but is also word-play - the phonetic spelling of the artist's name URY, in English.

Accompanying the sign are twelve holographic pages of quotations, framed in rows of three by four. The format emulates the Urim and Thummim, an ancient Jewish oracle. Taking issue with the 'Word' of the bible and the name of the father, which have been upheld as Law from time immemorial, from Moses until Freud, Tanya Ury attempts to locate her own position within the Judeo/Christian tradition.

“The word racine (root) has taken on a somewhat vulgar tint nowadays, rubbed in ideologies that have racist connotations. We must reduce it to ashes and wait for its rebirth. Then we will hear a very beautiful word. I thank Jean Racine, I return to my racines with Racine. The signifiers of our great writers work on us; the common proper name, the proper common name affects us, as readers, and especially the one whose name it is. We must all deal with the unconscious effects of our proper name. We find this aspect of language’s intervention in our destiny on the flesh of our imagination. We work on writers whose names are bearers of textual effects. That doesn’t mean I am attracted by authors whose names are at work in the language but simply that there aren’t any names which don’t produce signifying effects. Genet constantly puts his name to work in the French language. Entire works were born from his name. There is corneille (crow) in Corneille’s texts: the bird, the relation to elevation, to flying, to a certain type of bird. If we take up Leviticus again, we will find all kinds of crows. Racine must translate the effects of roots (racine) in all his texts, especially the roots (racines); since the proper name belongs to the order of roots, it is the lightest and most intangible root we have. It roots us, in language and beyond, without our knowing precisely where. One author whose name was not without signifying effects – of which he was perfectly well aware – is Kafka. In German, Kafka means chouca = corneille (crow). He too is a bird. He knows it, plays with it, inscribes it. In Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Writings and in the Diaries there are several instances of this type of small aphorisms that work on crows . It’s magnificent. The crows maintain that they can destroy the sky.

Franz Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, tr. C, Kaiser and G. Wilkins (New York: Schocken) ; Diaries 19919-1923, tr. Martin Greenberg (London: Mandarin, 1992)

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt about that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

It’s possible or it’s impossible, no one can go and verify. Perhaps that’s what going to the root is, going toward the unverifiable. As for Clarice Lispector’s name, who could invent a name more promising of light or vision?”
P. 145-146, “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing”, Hélène Cixous, 1993, Columbia University Press / New York, ISBN 0-231-07659-2

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Ury has also created other artworks that might be considered visual poetry. Sonata in Sea 1999-2000 is a photo series combined with poetry and wrestlewithyourangel 2001, is a neon sign produced together with the neon sign neonazi 2001; the title of a double photo portrait lesser is me more or less 2003 plays on the name of the German Post-Impressionist Lesser Ury, as does the title of a further double portrait or else 2007, which refers to the German writer Else Ury. The title of a third photo-portrait Beelzebularin 2005 (in the Promised Land series) reveals itself to be an anagram of the biblical Bezalel Ben Uri. half dimensional - semi detached 2010, combines the first of the half dimensional poems with the photograph semi detached.

Concrete poetry in the series:

femiNINIty – femininiation 1984 & 2011
moving message 1992
Word-fore-play - Recipe for Love 1995
Sonata in Sea 1999-2000
wish 2000
wrestlewithyourangel 2001
neonazi 2001
Poker Poems 2003
elle la poésie 2003
lesser is me more or less 2003
Beelzebularin 2005
Un 2006
or else 2007
half dimensional poems 2009-2011
half dimensional - semi detached 2010
cement 2011 -
on a mat appear 2011 -
Lost Poems 2011
weißer neger (white nigger) 2011
powdercake 19.12.2004 & 15.5.2011
informed 2011
concrete party 2011
oral call 2011
toned poems 2011-2012
two toned 2012