The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present the first exhibition by Clara Meister, the 2012 Curatorial Resident at the contemporary art space Ludlow 38.

“one and the other are another” includes new and recent works by five mostly Berlin-based artists. It 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.

In “The Jungle Book Project” (2002), Pierre Bismuth gives every speaking character of the original Walt Disney film its own specific language. By assembling all dubbed versions of the animated film, he creates a Babylonian encounter of languages in the jungle. This intervention makes a film that is part of today’s pop culture become unintelligible to the viewer. At the same time, our collective knowledge about the story and its characters makes the importance of understanding through language fade away.

Antonia Hirsch’s “Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge)” (2006-2012), two equally sized, immediately adjacent color fields, will be installed for the first time at this exhibition. The colors match the paints originally chosen during the Cold War era by East and West Germany for a bridge spanning between the cities of Berlin and Potsdam. While both political systems had agreed on the color green, each one interpreted this chromatic category differently. Underneath the naming and categorization of colors through a semiotic system such as language, their socio-cultural codification is revealed.

Jonathan Monk passed a sentence about the distinctiveness of speech by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein through an online translation program and created the original work “some words of wisdom from Wittgenstein translated by Google around the world from A through Z (with two mistakes)” (2012) for this exhibition. In a successive translation from one language into another without going back to the original quote, he plays a telephone game of translation.

In his collages (2010-2011), Hank Schmidt in der Beek recombines known classics of modern art with comics, an art form in which language is embedded in the image as actual writing. The image layers in the collages create the possibility of a new reading and bring to light a wit some of the classics might have lost in the process of becoming part of art history.

Ignacio Uriarte’s video “Infinity” (2010) is an animated attempt to make the handwritten infinity symbol truly infinite by moving its beginning and end points forward in an infinite loop. To achieve this, the symbol is copied repeatedly from the previous copy, provoking a continuous organic change of the original shape.