Sanatorium presents Ludovic Bernhardt’s third solo show at the gallery The Gaming Room between September 10 – October 24, 2021. The exhibition brings together works defined by the fields of geopolitics, game, and poetry. The Gaming Room is based primarily on a board game created by the CIA to train its agents. The artist reproduced and redesigned this cynical game that reflects the representation of the world by the US intelligence services, to turn it into a deconstructed, parasitised, and shattered huge labyrinth game with viral potential, without apparent rules, to be applied to a wall of the gallery. The second version of Chaos game (a table-board game that was first exhibited in France in 2020), shown in the exhibition, tackles the question of the slave’s revolution of 1791-1804 in Haïti, an island that became the main destination of the slave trade organised by the French colonial empire in the 18th century, as a prototype of an industrial and capitalist organisation. Ludovic Bernhardt’s graphics relate to the fall in global finance stock markets during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and are also featured in The Gaming Room, in the form of wallpapers and hand-made tapestries. A poet at work, immersed in textual and graphic networks, making reference to Sylvia Plath, Georg Trakl, Friedrich Hölderlin, Öyvind Fahlström, but also to the artist and writer’s own experimental writing. The Gaming Room is strongly characterized by an economic-political deciphering, but also it is accompanied by a poetic dimension that marks the exhibition as an experience of rhizomatic writing.
On the opening day of the exhibition Ludovic Bernhardt will hold a reading performance of a extract taken from his book ”Work Bitch”.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
