(01/31/2019) The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to announce that Franziska Sophie Wildförster has been awarded the 2019 curatorial residency within the Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 program. Wildförster has been living and working as a curator in Vienna, Austria, since 2013.
The curatorial residency includes a grant and the opportunity to program Ludlow 38, the residency’s Lower East Side art space, for a full calendar year. It was awarded by an international jury composed by curators Larissa Harris (Queens Museum of Art), Christian Rattemeyer (Museum of Modern Art), and Nicolaus Schafhausen (Kunsthalle Wien). The jury is convinced that Wildförster’s proposal to devote her residency to questioning dominance structures in capitalist societies will resonate with current discourses in New York and the United States, and that it will contribute new artistic perspectives to its advancement.
In her program for the Ludlow 38 art space, Wildförster plans to explore the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge in contemporary society through “hauntology” and the metaphor of the ghost. Operating at the intersection of capitalist mass culture, feminism, queer cultures, and decolonial thought, the artistic contributions to the program will haunt established knowledge and challenge its formation. In their work the artists invited by Wildförster invoke what is placed outside of “knowledge” and is excluded from the archive as a depository of a sanctioned past and politics, while proposing a (re-)imagined present and future.
Wildförster’s program at Ludlow 38 will start out with a group exhibition organized by the collective Cruising Pavilion (Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou), the second edition of their inaugural project on gay sex, architecture, and cruising cultures for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Cruising Pavilion, New York looks at the city’s histories, stories, utopias, desires, and memories of cruising, as well as its relationship with gentrification and rampant urban development. As the historic landscape and model of cruising is changing or even dwindling, this exhibition proposes cruising not as a practice limited to men who have sex with men, but as an exemplary examination of space that harbors the potential to challenge normative logics of embodiment and identification. Participating artists include Shu Lea Cheang, Victoria Colmegna, DeSe Escobar, Maude Escudié, Jürgen H. Mayr, Kayode Ojo, Carlos Reyes, Philipp Timischl, Robert Yang, and others. The exhibition opens February 22, 6:00-8:00pm and will be on view at Ludlow 38 through April 7 (opening hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1:00-6:00pm).
Throughout 2019 Ludlow 38 will see new installations and New York debuts by artists including Bonnie Camplin, Candice Lin, Paul Maheke, and Ser Serpas. Lydia Ourahmane has been commissioned to produce an off-site project.
Franziska Sophie Wildförster (born 1987 in Starnberg, Germany) is a curator based in Vienna. She received an MA in Visual Cultures and an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths University, London. From 2013 to 2016 she was assistant curator and later curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna. In 2016 she co-founded Kevin Space, an independent art space in Vienna where she presented exhibitions and projects with Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Lydia Ourahmane, Yuri Pattison, and Kandis Williams among others.