The year 2018 marks the tenth anniversary of MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38. This decade-long curatorial engagement in New York City calls for a critical reflection about Ludlow 38’s practice and knowledge production, both in regard to the New York arts community and to contemporary German art and culture.
During its 2018 residency at Ludlow 38, the Agency for Legal Imagination initiated a study focusing on the artists who, since 2008, have been actively affiliated with the program. The Agency worked with the Goethe-Institut on a comprehensive artist database and initiated a year-long conversation about race, gender, and age within the New York branch of the organization. As part of a public event, initial insights from the database will be made accessible to the general public.
With the study, the Agency sought to critically address the contemporary urgency for arts and cultural organizations to confront their own complicity in the structural marginalization of communities based on race, gender, and age. The conversation with independent scholar, writer and educator Nana Adusei-Poku and Thomas Lax, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, shall contextualize the Agency’s study in the current debate on racial imaginaries in the US and connected it to Germany’s cultural ambitions, particularly in relationship to the country’s colonial past and its desire for global cultural relevance.
Goethe-Institut New York, 7pm