Does reality consist of the objects, people, and formations existing around us? Well, both The Mark on the Wall and Ane Thon Knutsen’s exhibition offer ways to approach this question. In Woolf’s story, "The Mark on the Wall", it is clearly seen that the objects scattered around a room or people do not have enough power to grasp the notion of reality, let alone decipher it. That is mainly because they simply exist and try to figure out their place in the world. In this sense, they function as presences that share the same space and time as the narrator. This shared existence brings them to meet at a common denominator that offers the opportunity for them to understand each other gradually.

Accordingly, both the reader of the story and a Dasein wandering around the installation whose curious eyes sparkle with a desire to know more about the essence of life have the opportunity to approach "The Mark on the Wall" as well as the message that is intended to be voiced out through the installation with the perspective of a hermeneutic phenomenologist like Heidegger.

Heidegger believes that reality needs other entities to support itself. In other words, it exists through its relationships. For him, reality functions as the disclosedness of beings within a world; thereby naming the action as aletheia (unhideness) (Atahan & Aşkın, 2017, p.64). This task of disclosing a phenomenon relies heavily on Dasein, who exists with all the other entities and makes sense of them through interpretation.

In a similar manner, Knutsen’s exhibition calls for an interpreter to understand and accordingly elucidate its meaning. This is where Dasein – the viewer of the installation – is needed in the equation. By experiencing and interpreting the words on each paper, the viewer comes closer to the nature of reality and the essence of the exhibition. In doing so, it can comprehend itself at a deeper level, as it shares the very same reality as Knutsen’s installation.

Heidegger’s employment of aletheia shows that before we can talk about the accuracy of a statement, it must first appear and reveal itself. So, when we actually encounter “reality,” what we experience is the continuous process in which things both reveal and conceal themselves.

Correspondingly, Knutsen’s exhibition lets the story unfold itself spatially, rather than on a page. By putting 1,837 hand-printed A3 sheets on the walls of a bright gallery, Knutsen manages to create a reality of her own – her own mark on the wall. Now that the mark on the wall – literally – takes the shape of the words hung on a wall, text becomes space, reading becomes movement, and the mark becomes both material and metaphorical. With each word hung on the walls of the gallery, the story unfolds spatially rather than on a page, and the viewer walks inside the text. While the words are materially visible on the wall, their meanings hide themselves, waiting for a viewer to reveal them.

By exposing the words on the wall as bare as possible, Knutsen creates a space for the viewer to walk around them and unscramble the the story with naked eyes. In Heideggerian terms, Knutsen brings the being of the text into unconcealment as a crafted presence. This nature of the exhibition reveals what is hidden behind a text, such as the process behind typesetting, texture and size of the paper as well as the physical presence of the words.

Heidegger’s lichtung (clearing) stands for an open region in which beings are able to appear (Heidegger, 1962, p.171). Unsurprisingly, The Overlyssalen can be considered as the perfect spot to hold such an exhibition because it is as bright as it can be, spacious, and most importantly it is a clear space. Thanks to the setting, Knutsen achieves to make the wall the literal site of unconcealment. That is to say, with the help of the clear setting, Dasein can carefully examine the words and interpret them simultaneously while trying to figure out its own position in the world.

This spacious setting poses a problem, though. The words cover the walls to a great extent. That is why the viewer cannot grasp them all at once. The viewer is expected to take a walk to glimpse at words, yet doing that makes the viewer get the fragments of the words, rather than the whole story. It signifies the alethetic essence of the exhibition, implying that unconcealment is never total. Hence, we can culminate that the truth of the text – or reality – is experienced, and it can never be wholly grasped. Only through interpretation and the passing of time, we are able to understand ourselves through what we can catch out of fragments. Since our experience of the installation differs from one another, we can come up with the fact that the exhibition is open to any interpretation, and its meaning is variable.

From this perspective, we can see that Heidegger's ideas transform Ane Thon Knutsen's The Mark on the Wall into an event of aletheia, an occurring of truth in which reality is revealed in its material and temporal depth, rather than just an aesthetic or literary translation. Therefore, Knutsen successfully embodies Heidegger's observation that reality does not suffice on its own but instead originates through revelation within a world.

In this sense, Knutsen's work showcases Heidegger's idea that art is the place where being manifests itself on account of unconcealment. For this reason, Knutsen’s exhibition can be deciphered as a phenomenological event of unconcealment. By making the viewer look around and interact with the materiality of the short story, Knutsen blinks an eye to one’s own being-in-the-world.