Soon after completing her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and embarking upon a two-year sojourn in New York, the 25-year-old artist Hanne Darboven created "sketch sheets" on graph paper - early drafts of what would later form a system she would "write herself into" over the course of the ensuing years. During these years, exceptionally meaningful ones for both her life and her work, she developed in parallel a kind of self-assurance program, recording dates, observations and everyday experiences in countless small calendars. To these "existential bank statements" she later gave the title Existenz 66-68. In the frequent letters written to her family in Hamburg during this time she goes yet a step farther. More firmly anchored in her own private sphere, they serve as a "lifeline" in her quest for objectivity in her existence through the medium of words and messages: encounters (with Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, for example), questions regarding her own identity, her art and her efforts to come to terms with the self reflected in it. These letters from New York, which form both the core and the point of departure for important aspects of Hanne Darboven's oeuvre, are reproduced in facsimile and in their entirety in this publication. The artist: Hanne Darboven, born 1941 in Munich. Completion of studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, 1965. Sojourn in New York, 1966-68. Her first "calendar notes" originate from 1968. Return to Hamburg in 1969; participation at documenta 5 and 7. Awarded the Edwin Scharff Prize in 1986, received the International Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg, 1995. Lives and works in Hamburg.