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Goethe-Institut Announce We would provide complete darkness

The Goethe – Institut present We would provide complete darkness. Exhibition on view 12/02/11 – 12/22/11. Opening: 12/01/11, 6:00-8:00pm.

Complete darkness envelops 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, or 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 symbolic cue to highlight associations between insight, ordering, conservation, and personal experience.


Kitty Kraus, “Matrix 158,” Wadsworth Atheneum, 2010. Installation view, courtesy of the artist.

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. 1 (sononda) (2010) explores a sensorial world without a clear contextual or symbolic reference; instead, light-waves are sculptural entities in sonorous flux.

This exhibition also includes Never Odd Or Even, a mini-exhibition in book form about libraries and archives, 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 knowledge, 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 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.

On December 7, at 7:00pm, a parallel event with artist Amy Granat, lighting designer and environmental psychologist Linnaea Tillett, and Gregor Jansen, artistic director of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, will home in on modes of fascination and perception, in theory but also in practice. This event will take place at Cabinet Magazine, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217.

This exhibition was conceived—via Jorge Luis Borges—by Alfons Hug, director of the Goethe-Institut Rio de Janeiro, and has been realized and furthered in New York by curator Sarah Demeuse.

Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street (at Bowery)
New York, NY 10003
Opening hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 1:00-6:00pm
Free admission
Tel.: +1 (212) 439-8706

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