NEWS: PARALLEL VIENNA, THE LAKE (FACSIMILE)
SEPTEMBER 2023
PARALLEL VIENNA, THE LAKE (FACSIMILE)
ART & EXPOSITIONS / ART WORKS & EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
THE GAMING ROOM
Sanatorium, 2021
NIGHT MUSIC 1
(CIA Game)
Wall paper folio cut / 800x276cm / Ed. 1/3, 2021
NIGHT MUSIC 2
(Dow Jones, S&P, Nasdaq, EuroStoxx 50, Dax, CAC 40, FTCE 100, Ibex 35, Nikkey, Shanghai, Ibovespa, Hong Kong... Coronavirus spread sinks world stock markets)
Wall paper folio cut / 600x276cm / Ed. 1/3, 2021
DÉCORS À RÉACTIVER
Post-poetry video, 2021
CHAOS GAME N°2
Table, Led, HD print on Hahnemulhe photo rag smooth paper. Ed. 1/3, 2021
RUINES, RUINS, RUINEN...
HD print on Hahnemulhe photo rag smooth paper. Ed. 1/3, 2021
Coronavirus spread sinks world stock markets - 1 & 2
Tapestry: sylver ink painted on bazin (African damask textile) 2021
142 cm x 210 cm
MAGNESIUM SKY
In "Fragments of a hologram rose" exhibtion, Istanbul
I LIVE!
IN FACT, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED!
Athens, Greece. October-December 2021.
CounterPublics / Soft protocols, spatial narratives for counter-futures
CHAOS GAME (Haïtian Revolution)
In Sugar of the East, Galerie La Box, Bourges, 2020-2021
Curator : Ferenc Gróf (Société réaliste) / Photos © François Lauginie
THE DORMANT COLONY
Solo exhibition in the Sanatorium gallery, 2016
PRESERVE DEMOCRACY
150 x 150 cm, Installation with 40 medicine bottles, liquid detergent, stickers and neons, 2016
ASIA
120 x 110 cm, Oil painting on canvas, 2016
Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun
"The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total
integration in a disintegrating social totality." Tiqqun. Translated by Ariana Reines
Kill box
A4 (US army tactical documents), neons.
KILL BOX
A4 (US army tactical documents), neons. 2016
INTER CAETERA DIVINAE
(Among other…to the Divine)
36 x 38 cm
Engraving and painting on aluminum board
2016
The title to a papal bull from 1493 issued by Pope Alexander VI Inter caetera (“Among other”) was a papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI on4 May 1493, which granted to Spain (the Crowns of Castile and Aragon) all lands to the “west and south” of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde islands. This piece is refered directly to the book “Nomos of the earth” written by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt analysis of Nomos of the earth, argues that lines drawn between European soil and the so-calls “free space” of non-European soil, were “the facilitation of the colonial (political, military and economic) land appropriation of this New World. Drawing lines, which divided and distributed the entire earth, was made possible by what Schmitt called «global linear thinking», an integral part of the emerging spatial consciousness of modernity. (in The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt, edited by Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito.)
LEVIATHAN - MATTER, FORME AND POWER
48 x 48 cm
Engraving and painting on aluminum board
2016
This piece is refered directly to the book Leviathan written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651.
Istanbul Formula 1 conflict park
Art beat Istanbul
247 EUROPEAN REVOLTS
This piece presents a graph of the 247 social revolts that have taken place across european union countries from 2011 to 2014. These riots ar of progressivist nature, because they carry out an urgent struggle against discrimination of minorities, impoverishment, defamation of immigrants, fascism, neo-liberalism and oppressive policies such as « fortress Europe ». These revolts also serve a reactivation of a new democratic and civil contract that tends to disappear.
MIRROR OF THE REVOLTS #1
(Ikea shelves, mirrors, and engraved metal boards), 150 cm x 60 cm, 2014
The dates, locations and geographical coordinates of three of the most recent and significant revolts that happened in 2014 are engraved on metal plaques fixed under each shelf.
We are going to enter a new era of « time of riots » (Badiou). These revolts arise as an inversion of the society, ruled by so-called the spectacular democracies, which look ‘stable’ and ‘resigned’ on the surface.
This piece proposes a reversed reading of right/left and up/down: mirrored reversal of the « reality ». These plaques are a discrete celebration.
Among the revolts emerging all over the world every week, (whose the number is rising up since a decade) these three revolts were chosen as symptoms of a more conservative Europe, witnessing the rise of repression and intolerance: Rising of far right wing / retention camps for migrants / repression of the poverty and the economy of survival.
1-Vienna, Austria, January 24, 2014
Several protesters were arrested during violent demonstrations against an annual ball in the famous Vienna’s imperial Hofburg palace that traditionally draws far right-wing figures. 6,000 demonstrators took to the streets of the Austrian capital to protest against the so-called Academics’ Ball, part of the annual Viennese ball season, which was hosted by the far-right Freedom Party. The organisation “Jetzt Zeichen Setzen!” (Take a Stand Now), which campaigns for remembrance of victims of Nazism, published an open letter against the ball signed by six Holocaust survivors. “As survivors of the Nazi era, we are stunned that the Hofburg, which belongs to the republic, is still opening its doors to representatives of extreme-right organisations from Austria and Europe,” it said. Nazi Germany in 1938 annexed Austria, whose 200 000-strong Jewish population was wiped out in the Holocaust.
2-Vincennes, France : February 14, 2014
After the revolts and fire in 2008 in the detention camp of Vincennes near Paris, a new rebellion appeared in February 14 : it proves the deplorable and inhuman condition of detention of those people inside camps becoming European rules of migratory fluxes administration.
3-Athens, Grece. March 13, 2014
The Athens University of Economics and Business, one of Greece’s leading educational institutions, has been shut down on the orders of the university’s senate following escalating clashes between police and illegal street vendors who sell their wares on the sidewalk outside the Patission Street campus. Perfect symbol of the clash between academic economics institutions, and the survival economic behaviour of the poverty.
....
DRONE
Video projection on 6 pink liquid detergent bottles, 2014
Recorded by a US hunting drone in Afghanistan and later diffused on the Internet, this video is projected on a wall composed of 6 pink liquid soap bottles. In this installation, the “eye-machine”, imperialistic weapon that has become widespread, is associated with a domestic, mundane and hygienic object.
RUINS
Burned book, neon light. 70 x 70 cm.
With a « self-autodafé » the book Ruins, written in 2013 by the artist, (science & political fiction) had been destroyed and burned. In a « mise en abime » dynamic, the book set up in a self fiction and creates a kind of archeology of the futur. 2014
StrobFREUD (Civilization and Its Discontents)
Installation: Strobe, chains, drawing with graphite on a piece of rubber
Drawing of the original frontispiece of the Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents » combined with a strobe light.
This book, essential understand the irrational violence which shook Europe in 20th century, is subjected to the strong white light of the strobe, which makes it a cold analysis of a double-discontent: The discontent of the civilization that Freud studied in this book and the discontent of the failed reading of the book which could have guided the international political decisions of a civilisation subjected to the “death drive”.The drones names written on the plates come from U.S.A., France, Europe, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Germany, Israel, Russian, and U.K. They mostly Summons mythological references.
DRONES DRESSER
16 drones names applied on 16 standard domestic plates. The drones, unmanned aerial vehicles mostly used by the US army (and numerous other countries) during Middle East wars, became the hi-tech tools of a new barbarian Western remote-controlled domination, acting dangerously out of the conventional war rights. Used as surveillance, man hunt and remote killing machine tools, their coded names are, in this piece, confronted with the domestic and mundane identity of the plates, here showed as pure decorative objects: Both evocation of a globalised war imperialism and expression of private domestic banality. This series is based on the reading of the book “Theory of the Drone”, written by Grégoire Chamayou (2013) who analyses the recent transformation of wars leaded by the USA.
The drones names written on the plates come from U.S.A., France, Europe, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Germany, Israel, Russian, and U.K. They mostly Summons mythological references.
WheelXANAX
Meditative wheel composed of anxiolytic drugs boxes. The industrial pharmacopoeia creating the contemporary post-Fordist psychotropic psyche is represented by a meditative wheel, kind of techno-mystical graphic medium.
Lake Gozha Tso/Lake Zabuye/Lake Zahri Namco/Lake Rakshastal
4 wooden tables, 4 inkjet print on fine art paper. Each table 50 x 50 x 105 cm , 5+1 AP. 2014.
Four Tibetan lakes are depicted as mapped territories with precise borders whereas they belong to a natural register with fluctuating borders due to their liquid nature.
CONFLICT PARK (FORMULA 1 ISTANBUL PARK)
Print on vinyl, 300 cm x 200 cm, wood, Art Beat Istanbul, 2013
TABULA RASA (LE FRESNOY)
Environnement-installation, poèmes numériques, scénographie de théâtre.
ludovic bernhardt © all rights reserved, Paris 2023
