We would provide complete darkness at Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building

We would provide complete darkness 
December 2–22, 2011

Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street
New York, NY 10003

www.goethe.de/newyork/completedarkness

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 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, it 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.

The Goethe-Institut New York is a branch of the Federal Republic of Germany’s global cultural institute, established to promote the study of German language and culture abroad, encourage international cultural exchange, and provide information on Germany’s culture, society, and politics.

*Image above:
Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum