For his GAK annual edition, Mark Wallinger, Turner Prize winner in 2007, has reissued a work from 2000 in a smaller version. Word in the Desert I shows him dressed as the figure he himself developed, Blind Faith (with a white shirt, black trousers, black tie and sunglasses) at the grave of the drowned writer Percy Bysshe Shelley in Rome. By turning the image by 180°, Wallinger hangs upside down at the gravestone – like a bat waiting for the coming of the night (Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). The inscription on the stone, Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s Tempest, is made legible by the rotation of the image: “Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange”. The work thus recalls various ideas of life and death, transience and transformation and by simple means opens up multi-layered levels of meaning.