Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 3rd Street, 212 4398700
East Village / Lower East Side
December 2 - December 22, 2011
Reception: Thursday, December 1, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Complete darkness envelopes three art works as well as a library. Shutting out light is the prime, physical condition for this exhibition. Light and reflections, in contrast, provide the basic ingredients for the works that explore notions of movement, scale, organization, and orientation. In parallel, a small, twilight library functions as support for the display and distribution of a take-away publication that takes light as a symbolical cue to highlight associations between insight, ordering, conservation, and personal experience.
Heike Baranowksy’s video, Mondfahrt 2001 (2001), puts a bright full moon center stage. In presenting the moon as a bouncing ball trapped in a square night sky, her video upends celestial stasis as well as the human desire for space travel. Kitty Kraus’s installation of mirror box-lamps, placed in a layout specifically designed for the Wyoming Building, is made from simple combinations of modern materials and concepts. The boxes expand the potential of light reflected and give for a mise en abîme in the gallery. Carsten Nicolai’s film future past perfect pt. 01 (sononda) (2010) explores a sensorial world without a clear contextual or symbolic reference; instead, light waves are sculptural entities in sonorous flux.
This exhibition coincides with the launch of Never Odd Or Even, a mini-exhibition in book form about the organization of knowledge, featuring personal and associative contributions by Alejandro Cesarco, Sarah Hromack, Angie Keefer, Christoph Keller, Adam Kleinman, E.R. Langen, and Jorge Méndez Blake. As metaphor for enlightened understanding, light implies a sense of order and infinity and thus suggests a host of current questions about the management and use of stored knowledge. At the Goethe-Wyoming Building, a library of underused books, on their way to dispersion and de-acquisition, houses this curated publication. At the Goethe-Institut’s library stacks on Spring Street, the publication will gradually trace the patterns of use. This object was designed by Project Projects.