Dear friends of Ludlow 38,

We would like to invite you to the opening of a new site-specific installation by Berlin-based Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson. The Emperor’s New Thoughts will unfold during a happening with live music by Shawn Greenlee, a recording of which will contribute to a subsequent installation in the gallery.

Bo Christian Larsson uses his drawings and paintings as blueprints for his installations, which often are the outcome of happenings. For each happening, many of the spatial elements and references are pre-chosen, while the spontaneous moments are not controlled. This combination of spontaneity and intention is prominent in Larsson’s practice; the artist sees no difference between his finished work and its process. Working with obscure and mysterious symbols, Larsson simultaneously plays with the clichés of symbolism and the common reading of clichés.

The starting point of The Emperor’s New Thoughts is a loose adaption of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. Larsson had parts of the tale translated through synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which certain experiences, such as color and taste, are combined. The words of Andersen’s story were translated into colors and shapes of familiar symbols, like circles and squares. During the happening, one of Larsson’s Alter Egos will activate the visualization of the synaesthetic interpretation by pulling strings. The strings release pigments in a certain order, creating forms in a brightly lit room, which serves as a stage. This translation of movements into shapes is followed by another translation, into music. Drawing on his longstanding interest in music, Larsson collaborates with Shawn Greenlee, a sound artist who will make the shapes audible with customized instruments, in a direct reaction to the happening.

Bo Christian Larsson (born 1976 in Kristinehamn, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at AKI, Academy of Visual Arts in Enschede, Holland. Larsson has had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig; Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria; and Gallery Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen. His work has been presented in group exhibitions at Kunstverein Munich; Lenbachhaus Munich; Shiryaevo Biennale, Russia; Hayward Gallery, London; and Arario Gallery, Cheonan, Korea. In 2009 Larsson received the Philipp Otto Runge Residency Scholarship and was artist-in-residence at Kunst:Raum Sylt Quelle. During The Emperor’s New Thoughts, a selection of his sculptures, drawings, and paintings will be presented at Vogt Gallery, New York.

Shawn Greenlee is a sound and electronic media artist. In his recent performance and installation work, Greenlee has focused on generating digital audio from graphic patterns. Via computer programs of his own design, he advances new methods for interpreting visual images as sound (graphic synthesis).

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Paul Stephens and Graham Parker, and the first published interview with all of Bo Christian Larsson’s Alter Egos.

For more information on the exhibition and related events visit www.ludlow38.org

Anri Sala – Centre Pompidou Galerie Sud
3 mai – 6 août 2012
11h00 – 21h00

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Dear friends of Ludlow 38,

We would like to invite you to the first solo exhibition in the United States by Berlin-based artist Natalie Czech opening on Thursday, March 29, at 6:00pm.

On Saturday, March 31, at 6:00pm, we will host a reading by Tan Lin in the exhibition. Please see below for more information.

Czech’s photography explores the visual possibilities of poetry, deepening the dialogue between the written word and visual art. I have nothing to say. Only to show. includes two series by the artist.

For A small bouquet by Frank O’Hara, Czech invited seven writers to interweave new texts with a picture poem by American poet Frank O’Hara. O’Hara’s calligram, simultaneously both poem and image, serves as the static visual structure around which each new text is arranged. Czech photographs each page, “retrieving” the disguised calligram by circling each of its words with oil pastel. Through this interplay of appearance and disappearance, Czech emphasizes the form of the calligram, as well as her own approach: one can never see the image and read the text at the same time.

For the series Hidden Poems, Czech discovered pre-existing poems in articles in magazines and illustrated books. By highlighting single words in these texts, she reveals poems by Jack Kerouac, E. E. Cummings, Robert Lax, Robert Creeley, and others. Confronted with Czech’s photograph of each page, the viewer scans the text, reading each word of the short, often pictorial poems in sequence. The poems do not serve as Czech’s “second reading” of the text; they rather exist as a hidden, coincidental message, in conversation with the remaining text and the adjacent illustrations.

Natalie Czech (born 1976) lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at, among others, NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Her work will be shown in Made in Germany Zwei at Sprengel Museum, Hannover, opening May 2012. She has received numerous awards and grants, including, in 2011, the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach grant for contemporary German photography.

On Saturday, March 31, Tan Lin will project two Powerpoint works, Bibliographic Sound Track and The Ph.D sounds (both 2012). A brief discussion with Ludlow 38 curator Clara Meister will follow. The works explore different communications platforms such as Twitter, SMS, programming languages, and the couplet, and their effects on reading and genre. Tan Lin is the author of more than ten books, including Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) and 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010). His work has appeared in numerous journals including Artforum, Cabinet, and The New York Times Book Review.

I have nothing to say. Only to show. will be accompanied by a publication with essays by Andrew Berardini and Barry Schwabsky.

For more information on the exhibition and related events visit www.ludlow38.org

MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38
38 Ludlow Street (between Grand and Hester)
New York, NY 10002

OPENING: February 15, 6:00-8:00pm
OPEN Thursday – Sunday 1:00 – 6:00pm
February 16 to March 18, 2012

“one and the other are another” deals with language and translation in a reflection about the emergence of new meaning in communication – in text and speech as well as in well-known images and shared concepts. With new and recent works by mainly Berlin based artists:

Pierre Bismuth gives every speaking character of Walt Disney’s “The Jungle Book“ its own specific language. By assembling all dubbed versions of the animated film, he created a Babylonian encounter of languages in the jungle. Jonathan Monk passed a sentence of Wittgenstein about the distinctiveness of speech through an online translation program and starts a telephone game of translation. Antonia Hirsch deals with the naming and categorizing of colors through a semiotic system such as language taking a bridge spanning between former West and East Germany as an example. In the collages by Hank Schmidt in der Beek known classics of modern art communicate with comic and film characters. Ignacio Uriarte’s video “Infinity“ is an animation, which tries to make the handwritten infinity symbol truly infinite by moving the beginning and end point forward in an infinite loop.

Editor: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
German/English
16,5 x 24 cm
100 pages, approx. 100 color images, softcover
978-3-942405-48-5
Release: February 2012
24.90 €

Saturday, October 29, 2011
“Every bookshop hides another bookshop”
A bookshop selected by Nico Dockx, April Lamm and Clara Meister
Beginning between 10 – 11 AM, open end
Buchhandlung Walther König
Burgstraße 27, 10178 Berlin

Anri Sala
1 October – 20 November 2011
Serpentine Gallery London

Jordan Wolfson
08.09.2011 – 15.01.2012
SCHMELA HAUS

The fIlm “1395 Days without Red” by Šejla Kamerić & Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers, for which we have designed the title sequences, will premiere at the Manchester International Festival on July 2nd. Projections will run until July 17th. Other projections to be announced soon.
More information here

We are very happy to finally publish our website and give an insight to the studios practice. Not all the projects are online, yet. Please come back for further updates.