Katharina Ludwig

31 January 2026, Chert Lüdde, Berlin

This Saturday, REAL EKPHRASIS continues as a poetry book launch of Dear Enheduanna (2025 @uglyducklingpresse ) by Erin Honeycutt

“Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic.”

Join us for readings by Liola Mattheis, Katharina Ludwig, Wendy Shaw, and Erin Honeycutt.

Liola Mattheis is a poet and theorist based in Berlin. She currently works as a doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research. Her academic work focusses on how to critically relate subjectivation and natural history. She also studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig for a while, but kind of put that on pause for now. Her poetic practice plays with constraints and is driven by abstraction.

Affiliated with the eminent GDCU — gleefully deinstitutionalized and creatively undisciplined — Wendy Shaw is going to read a short excerpt from her multi-media novel Barbaflorida, which uses the fourteenth-century illuminated autofiction of Ramon Llull, commonly heralded as the great grandfather of artificial intelligence, to excavate the ghosts of Islam hovering between the pages of Europe’s self-narration.

Katharina Ludwig is a writer, poet, theorist, artist, and editor based in Berlin and London. Their research and writing addresses queer feminist practices of resistance and revolt. Katharina’s first single authored book ‘The Hole: An Insurrectionary Poetics’ is forthcoming as a parallel publication of one book and three opuscules with MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE and Cutt Press.

Erin Honeycutt is a writer based in Berlin where they run the publishing project Cutt Press. Stay tuned for Night School forthcoming from MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE.

online, 29-30 November 2025

Cutt Press / Vortext Magazine will be hosting readers from Berlin in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Global Marathon of Solidarity, a 24 hour gathering of poets, writers, artists, and organisers standing in resistance and deep solidarity with Palestine.

Saturday 29 November
20:30-21:00 Palestine time (EET) / 19:30 EST

Join on YouTube for the full 24 hour reading (link in bio):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGUgT3hxHes

Workshop as part of Şona Air residency. Making natural ink and a collective drawing.

9.11.2025

Writers Erin Honeycutt, Katharina Ludwig, a.Monti join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation.

29 October 2025

The group will discuss CUTT PRESS’s work as a publishing project producing poetry, pamphlets, bootlegs, artist books, and reprints in many collaborations, as well as its connective circuits VORTEXT and Womanwood.

Video documentation of the event is available on The Brooklyn Rail website.

The Meadow in the Future? Interdisciplinary, Participatory Methods, and the Continuity of Cultural Programmes

25 October 2025, The Multicultural Center of Transilvania University, Brașov, Romania

The three-day colloquium is organised as part of the Pajistea - Reimagining the Cultural Hearth exhibition. Starting from within the framework of the current exhibition, it aims to address and discuss numerous overlapping methodologies and trajectories, including artistic, anthropological, ecological, participatory, transdisciplinary, collaborative processes, intergenerational cultural activities, research strategies, and the possibility of sustaining cultural programmes in cultural hearths or other appropriate institutions in rural contexts. What are the aims, joys, and challenges of such a project?

Transdisciplinary and Participatory Methodologies, Starting with the “Meadow” 5:00–5:15 PM – Project introduction 5:15–5:45 PM – The Importance of an Integrated Approach “Natural-Cultural” for the Sustainable Management and Conservation of Meadows. What Role could Art Play? Alina Ioniță, PhD 6:00–6:30 PM – The Gap in the Text as a Feminist Subversive Practice and Collective Writing with Katharina Ludwig 6:30–7:00 PM – Roundtable and open discussion Guests: Alina Ioniță (PhD, nature conservation specialist)

Elated to have been selected for a two months research and writing residency at Şona-Air.

from their website:

Șona AIR is a program of individual residencies that helps artists and other people working in the field of culture to research and finalize their own projects, by providing them with the necessary space and time during their stay at the Blue House in the village of Șona.

Read an interview with me about it here.

With Erin Honeycutt, Katharina Ludwig and GUEST POETS

20 September 2025, Refuge Worldwide

VORTEXT is a mail subscription magazine for poetry, poetics, and other short forms of writing. This is our first radio listening session in which we will introduce and hear readings from the guest contributors of our first three issues.

It’s founded in the spirit of practices of self-publishing, circulation, and distribution of new writing, tracing the footsteps and tracks of subscription magazine traditions, such as Diane Di Prima’s and Amiri Baraka’s The Floating Bear – A newsletter. As most of the correspondences that reach us through the letterbox are usually bills, advertisement, invoices, and other unpleasant communication, VORTEXT aims to contribute a more enjoyable form of mail correspondence.

This radio show is to celebrate the first three issues and offer another form of experiencing the work of our contributors.

Program

Erin Honeycutt will read from Night School.

Katharina Ludwig will read fromThe Hole: An Insurrectionary Poetics.

Bridget Penney will read from Sonia’s Book.

Sam Cottington will read from People Person.

Susan Finlay will read from The Lives of Artists.

Sharon Kivland will read from Her Discourse.

26. Lange Buchnacht, Vierte Welt Berlin, 17 May 2025

Link

14. December 2024, Vierte Welt Berlin

For the fifth encounter of the discursive series On(going) Trauma at Vierte Welt Berlin guests and audience are invited to collectively address questions regarding trauma’s complex effects on temporality and how these are being explored, transformed or conveyed in artistic (and research) practices. Together, we will be focusing on the repetitive and sudden presence (– the timeliness –) of traumata between past experiences and possible future scenarios, on non-linear fragmentation of individual and collective memories, and on its transgenerational traces inscribed throughout personal histories. Trauma will be discussed as holes and portals for temporalities and voices, as un-healing wounds in poetry, texts, and language as such (Katharina Ludwig), as vocal echos of past violences shifting in time within the streets of Ukraine’s city Kharkiv (Mykola Ridnyi) and as a poetic excavation of identity, displacement and the collective scars of conflict, exploring how trauma reshapes language, with poetry bearing witness to the unspeakable effects of ongoing crises (Ghayath Almadhoun).

On(going) Trauma – Artistic Narratives on Collective And Individual Wounds. A Discursive Series in 6 Parts offers a forum to talk about and learn from artistic and curatorial research practices in dealing with trauma from plural perspectives, as well as repositioning its concept. On(going) Trauma is initiated by Anna- Lena Werner and Elisa Müller in cooperation with Vierte Welt Berlin. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

10 November 2024, online

online launch and reading

Launch celebration and reading for the fourth issue of αntiphony, a San Francisco-based journal of poetry and criticism. Contributors include: Léon Pradeau, Inkyoo Lee, Rusty Morrison, Cy March, Robert Kelly, Katharina Ludwig, and more.

11 July 2024, Utopie Cafe, Berlin

17 August 2024, Café Plume, Berlin

Koin us for a late summer underworld lick! Will be reading poems next Saturday, 17.08. at Café Plume in Berlin, alongside three big poetry crushes of mine………… ⛲️

Tess Brown-Lavoie friend comrade gorgeous farmer of gentler futures, whose decadent/mystic words were my companion thru winter, Erin Honeycutt everyone’s bookstore heartthrob and fearless witch-smut-publisher extraordinaire and Katharina Ludwig literal scholar of orifices and insurrectionary poetics in w/holes. Dreams do come true. Come join for a last gasp/grasp before something greens turns to something else. 🌱

Looking forward to gathering w u

6 July 2024, St. Pancras Church, London

You are warmly invited to Ritual/Bodies, a live performance event and panel discussion, hosted by Goldsmiths CHASE funded Religion and Art Live, at St Pancras Euston Road on Saturday 6th July from 1.45pm, curated by Kate Pickering.

(Un)godly limbs, wombs, wounds, tongues and earthy crumbs materialise through dance, sound, costume, spoken word and performative ritual, resurrecting the hol(e)y, dis/obedient body within Christian tradition. Come and share in an unorthodox communion, take a pilgrimage down into the ground of deathly rebirth, witness the fragmented, in/credulous body on the cusp between inside and out, as the Last Man on Earth wanders among us.

Artists:
Katharina Ludwig and M. Maria Walhout: Wet Muscle – Conjured Fragments
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson: Diocletian Canticle
Holly Slingsby : Earth Rite
Sarah White: Oh Crumbs!
Ric Stott: 100 Flowers of Psyche
Garry Rutter: Condensed Milk Club; Know that He’s the Last Man on Earth
Kate Pickering: St Julian and The Wandering Womb

An afternoon of performance will be followed by a panel discussion and Q and A. The discussion will focus on a renewed interest in ritual and the body in contemporary art, in particular how contemporary artists are taking up devotional cultures and revisiting the sacred to produce decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically oriented worlds.

We thank the Christian Arts Trust and Goldsmiths Graduate School Fund for their generous support.

29 July 2023, Cafe Plume, Berlin

20 October 2022, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

Book launch of This Energy Wasted by Flight– by Lotte L.S., edited by Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff and Katharina Ludwig. Supported by Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

The two years past may have become a lesson in the navigation and reevaluation of the term intimacy. It felt like the word was re-written, re-inscribed with an additional and much more challenging signification, than commonly associated with it. Intimacy in conjunction with solitude, a mandated privacy, also became suffocating, narrow, restraining, a lonely affair. To be on or with our own only, alone, all the time alienates and detaches us from ourselves much rather than it provides a focus point.

The two texts of This Energy Wasted by Flight – document and capture a constant struggle: to navigate both the realm in which language is shared and the subjectivity of language. Words that are not ours seep in and are lifted from the different contexts surrounding us (“The language we are afforded is not our own”). Speaking, writing and therefore language are practices grounded in a social realm, in a shared realm.

The search for that text (or that song or that film) that explains to us a hitherto inexpressible experience is symptomatic of the way we approach cultural products as therapeutic. But as products they reaffirm neoliberalism’s structure of competition, performance, and resilience. This publication, derived from a constantly morphing organisational structure currently associated with the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, attempts to offer writers a context for pursuing forms of writing that in turn examine possibilities of reciprocal writing, reading and listening.

25 September 2022, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

Book launch of Abécédaire by Sharon Kivland.

With readings by
Sharon Kivland, Phoebe Blatton, Susan Finlay, Elijah Jackson, Katharina Ludwig, Dalia Neis
+ a song by Anna Clementi

17-18 November 2021, Univeristät der Künste, Berlin

Among other things, design is always performance. The Medienhaus Lectures 2021 take a look at performance in design beyond the moment of presentation. Type, color, materiality etc. are design elements that have their own performativity. The same is true for the human body. So could the design process be considered a performance? How diverse are the bodies involved? How differentiated is the body image in the field of design? And, what are the performative effects on bodies of norms and rules derived from that? Performance! prompts the Medienhaus Lectures 2021 together with guests from design, art and theory to bring the body into play.

Speaker*innen:
Pasquale Virginie Rotter, Anna Jehle & Juliane Schickedanz (Kunsthalle Osnabrück), David Liebermann, Maximilian Kiepe & Jana Reddemann (Liebermann Kiepe Reddemann), Katharina Brenner, Ece Canlı, Hannah Witte, Katharina Ludwig, Claire Finch

Organisation:
Annika Haas (UdK, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Gestaltung), Henrike Uthe (UdK, Institut für Transmediale Gestaltung)

Design: Jonas Gerber, Nour Al Safadi, Lea Verholen

Un-w/hol(e)-y
A reading performance by Katharina Ludwig weaving through the site of Lobe Block in search for an un-w/hol(e)-y, unreliable language of an environment/co-habitation that grows into a narrative choreography. Perhaps there will be props and objects involved.

August 15th - September 19th

Opening
August 15th 12–10 pm

Opening times
Sat/Sun 12–6 pm

Location
Lobe Block, Böttgerstraße 16, 13357 Berlin

„The new frontier is your epidermis“ writes Paul B. Preciado in his Art Forum essay Learning From The Virus and thereby points to the fact that the borders and outlines of countries, buildings and yes, bodies, are not set in stone but continuously drawn and redrawn. The permeability of the skin, Preciado seems to suggest, is not merely a biological fact, but also serves as an architectural and geographical metaphor. Conceiving of bodies, objects, territories and buildings as porous entities, however, poses the question whether the subject/object divide that we have grown so accustomed to is conceptually still feasible. Are there other ways to make sense of the world, conceptually and/or aesthetically as well as socially?

See you next week at Hopscotch Reading Room for the next iteration of Low Text 7.Contracts 19.08.

Readings, screenings and performances with:

Sharon Kivland,
Corinna Sigmund,
Kat Schneider,
Rheremita Cera,
alex cruse,
Alia Zapparova and
Parrr Geng.

This edition is co-curated by Katharina Ludwig and Maru Mushtrieva.

Doors 7:30 pm, performances and readings 8 pm sharp. Fb event in bio. Poster design: Alexandra Zacharenko

With kind support of Flutgraben e.V..

23 July - 30 August, D21, Leipzig

27 November 2019, Flutgraben, Berlin

20–26 June 2019, Very Project Space, Berlin

Between June 20 and 26 Very hosts F L O A T / I N G – an exhibition and performative encounter. Several artistic positions have been invited to address and accommodate different aspects of the term floating, which is simultaneously understood as a notion and an acronym.

The first part F L O A T takes place on June 20 from 7-10 pm at Very, continuing until June 26.

On June 26 I N G moves the encounter outside to the banks of the old river Panke, a former sewer near Very in the district of Gesundbrunnen, starting at 6 pm.

with:
Johanna Ackva, Aleksandra Bielas, Catherine Biocca, Antonia Breme & Dominik Noé, Lennart Constant, Vincent Grunwald, Yala Juchmann, Yuki Kishino, Martin Kohout, Katharina Ludwig & Alice Rekab, Ayumi Rahn, Niclas Riepshoff, Aboud Saeed, Marie Schoppmann, Anna Seitz

F L O A T / I N G is organized by Aleksandra Bielas, Gislind Köhler @gigiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.i and Anna Zett @zwerran I N G is organized in cooperation with @projectspacefestival ⛵🌊 . .

13 June 2019, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

with readings from THE GRAVESIDE ORATIONS OF CARL EINSTEIN (eds Dale Holmes & Sharon Kivland)
Introduction by Dale Holmes

I. Geoffrey Wildanger, Sonja Burbidge (read by Irina Gheorghe), Hannes Bajohr (read by Donal Fitzpatrick), Betsy Porritt
II.  Sean Bonney & Sacha Kahir, Declan Clarke, John Z. Komurki (read by Sean Smuda)
III. Christian A. Wollin, Ed Luker, Matthew Burbidge, Katharina Ludwig, Donal Fitzpatrick
IV. Sacha Kahir, Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko (extract, read by Sharon Kivland), Sharon Kivland, Spartakus
John Cunningham  read four extracts from his essay in each of the sets above, There was birdsong and Susan Philipsz sang a lament.

Exhibition and performative events platform organised by Monika Oechsler & Monica Biagioli in celebration of Women’s History Month.

Private View Friday 15 March 2019, 6-9pm

Saturday and Sunday16 & 17 March 2019 from 12-6pm

Chisenhale Art Place, Chisenhale Studios

Studio 29 B and Education Room

64-84 Chisenhale Rd

London E3 5QZ

Salon for a Speculative Future champions and creatively highlights female contributions to society and culture. Thirty artists have designed individual art works, pamphlets, banners and posters, honouring their choice of key female figures, both known and unknown, who inspire their work and thinking. The collection of artworks, the Salon Material Collection for the Future, will be available later in form an online publication and will be added to, hence grow and expand, over time through further reiterations of the Salon project.

During the private view the exhibition is accompanied by live performances, sound work and screenings of moving image work.

Participating artists:

>Monica Biagioli >Cecile Emanuelle Borra >Maria Chevska >Judith Cowan >Claire Davies >Nooshin Farhid >

Rachel Garfield >Denise Hawrysio >Marie von Heyl >Rosemary Hogarth >Susan Johannknecht >Claudia Kappenberg >Sharon Kivland >Karen Russo >Catherine Steed >Marie Pierre Leroux >Katharina Ludwig >Ruth Maclennan >Jo Mitchell >Katharine Meynell >Christina Mitrentse >Monika Oechsler >Helen Robertson >Lena Serafin >Naomi Siderfin >Pam Skelton >Mo Throp >Myriam Thyes >Jessica Vorsanger >Elizabeth Wright

𝘽𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝘿𝙞𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙖 was originally broadcast on Radio Quantica Lisbon, as a guest mix by 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗸𝗮𝗯 for Diana Policarpo’s 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀𝙏𝙄𝘾𝙎 # 12 on 17th November 2017. For this broadcast, artists, architects and theorists were invited to contribute recordings that gathered loosely around the theme of the Diorama as a place in which multiple stories or broken retellings can be read as one or in parts; where the sequence of these narratives is dependent on the onlooker.

At the 2018 Dublin Art Book Fair 𝘽𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝘿𝙞𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙖 was presented as a table with writings and publications from the broadcast’s contributors. 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗸𝗮𝗯 produced two new textile works to facilitate the display of the written material and activate the Atrium area as a place for reading and discourse. Visitors could listen to the broadcast during the Book Fair in the Atrium at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

The collection acquired by NIVAL in 2018 consists of writings and publications from the broadcast’s contributors. The collection also includes archival prints and digital copies of the textiles by 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗸𝗮𝗯 hung at the Dublin Art Book Fair. Visitors to the NIVAL Reading Room can also listen to a digital copy of the 𝘽𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝘿𝙞𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙖 broadcast, originally aired on Diana Policarpo’s 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀𝙏𝙄𝘾𝙎 # 12 show for Radio Quantica.

Contributors to 𝘽𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝘿𝙞𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙖: Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Tina Kinsella, Katharina Ludwig, Alice Rekab & Alison Ballance, Ishita, Alexa Jean Barrett, Uma Breakdown, Elin Eyborg Lund & Anders Brasch-Willumsen, Susan Conte, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Jenna Collins, Sarah Lederman & Lola Bunting, Tai Shani, Alice Rekab & Stephen Rekab.

NIVAL collections are accessible to everyone for exploration, education and research.

24 October 2018, Peer Gallery, London

I like how it sounds a bit like wimmin. Wimmin-ing. It’s queer and i and i, like we. It’s lots. Very plural-y. And very very and so. Sounds like lips and ellipses and singing and kissing and something about size, like a thing that is small and growing. It’s funny how ppl get upset from internet comments about bad lipsing. Lipsing is verby it’s doing. It’s now. It’s painting the chin and cheeks so the lips stand out. It’s a tongue in another mouth. To go inside your body. The i’s are quite wavy i and i and i and i and i and i. It’s slow then it’s fast. I’m thinking about the shapes the sound makes my mouth. what words do with me. ii is air muscled out. When did I suck that air iin even? iilwimi lipsing is nice to say softly against the hand. Rushy.

Catherine Smiles and I co-edited and organised the most recent issue of PaperWork: iilwimi lipsing, 2018, with support from Daphne de Sonneville. iilwimi lipsing is about a politics of not-translating and listening with a feminist ear which can also be an eye, skin or fist. You can read the editorial which is published online as part of So remember the liquid ground.

Contributors Ntiense Eno Amooquaye, Alison Ballance, Uma Breakdown, DJ Lynnée Denise, Darkie Fiction, Carl Gent, Harry Josephine Giles, Halima Haruna, Monika Kalinauskaite, Johanna Maj Schmidt, Taylor Le Melle, Anna Sadlon, Himali Singh Soin, Daniella Valz Gen and Frank Wasser.

+ Madeleine Stack, Katharina Ludwig and Chloe Chignell. We held three nights of live art writing: performance, soundings and screenings at Serf, Leeds, 20 October; PEER, London, 24 October and Primary, Nottingham, 2 November.

SEPT 27, 7pm / ~1h READING NIGHT With Katharina Ludwig, Soline Krug, Samantha Bohatsch, Liesje De Laet & Katinka de Jonge (Wellness Centre "Future Proof")

SEPT 28, 7.30-9pm Project Space Award Ceremony At Bar Babette

SEPT 21-30, 2018 GETTING AWAY WITH IT (ALL MESSED UP) By Berkay Tuncay

All events are included in Berlin Art Week

1 September 2018, Display, Berlin

OPEN WOUNDS

By Shira Wachsmann and Katharina Ludwig

Opening Sat, Sept 1, 2018, 6pm

Exhibition Sept 1-9, 2018

Katharina Ludwig, mein Gast in dieser Folge, ist Künstlerin und promoviert zur “Wunde am Text”. In unserer Gesprächs-Maschine unterhalten wir uns über Zentauren, Frankensteins Monster, den Cyborg und andere Begriffsfiguren der Theorie, die für das Verhältnis von Text und Körper stehen. Wir sprechen über künstlerische Forschung, prothetische Literatur und feministische Geschichtsschreibung. Mit Hélène Cixous diskutieren wir die écriture féminine, lassen uns von Gilles Deleuzes Fingernägeln ablenken und überlegen wie sich der Begriff des Werdens zum Schreiben verhält.

Link zum Webplayer in Bio. Außerdem auf Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podimo etc.

Wording – Collaborative Writing in Public Space is a collective exercise in how we perceive while being in public space. The aim is to study how we respond to public space and to notate what we observe. Since it is undoable to write down everything that happens in one’s surroundings, the writing becomes a series of choices. This workshop is about learning to be aware of these choices and questions if the physical senses perceive in a categoric mode. The aim of this collective attempt at writing is to shape a public space using words and to position ourselves in shared spaces and reciprocated texts. The writing during Wording has a performative quality as the writers in public space are observed themselves, and the workshop asks if this collective writing experiment acts as a countertext to the commodification of our corporeal selves. Wording – Collaborative Writing in Public Space is inspired by Georges Perec and his experimental book Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Perec observed Place Saint-Sulpice in October 1974. His idea was to pay attention to the seemingly insignificant, and to notice what is taking place when nothing special is happening. Perec noted down the date, time of day, place and weather, and then went on to write a list of what was happening within his field of vision. He returned on three successive days, and was himself gradually transformed into one of the recurrent figures in the square. His writing work, in turn, successively altered what he was observing; the square became a text and a written rendition of a public space. The project is organised by Lena Seraphin.

03 August 2018, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

Drastic reappraisals of social, cultural, and biological realities have become a daily affair in a culture that increasingly operates at a rate faster than the speed of human perception, where thought itself becomes an afterthought. If Marx’s observation that, under capitalism, all that is solid melts into air, what then happens when air itself deliquesces into billions of ideologically coded fragments of information, infinitely reproduced, infinitely exchangeable, infinitely fathomless and irreducible? If literature is to respond to the present circumstance, it must metabolise this boundless volatility. The writers featured - in addition to William Kherbek - Elvia Wilk, Sydney Beaumont, George Titheridge, Susan Finlay, Alice Miller and Katharina Ludwig confront the bulls and bears of our own psychological and structural positions. They strive to express their own experience in a world where value lies somewhere beyond the boundaries of familiar ethics and humanity. They bring their insights, impressions, and the impasses which they confront, both in the world and within themselves to their varied artistic practices. The results may simultaneously stun, move, and trouble their audiences. Volatility is back, the economists tells us, but volatility has always been with us and within us. Now, as its presence is more visible in daily life - no matter how ostensibly secure one’s position may be - the question is less how will one manage the ruptures that define the new “normal”, but how one will find one’s place in this new landscape. How will one greet this most familiar of Others: the instability in which our own identities and perceptions are grounded, the quicksand of subjectivity?

Link to Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2379558498937294/?notif_t=plan_user_joined&notif_id=1530605977622404

24 May 2018, Flutgraben, Berlin

What do they mean for us now and how do we deal with them? Who is the author of these texts? And can one choose to be their author? The cycle LOW TEXT aims to explore text production as a social practice and texts that surround us, invisible in their ubiquity. These “exhausting” types of texts - work emails, application, manuals, automated texts, while being a device of initiating and relating, became today an appendage of a bureaucratic machine that frames, silences and flattens the diversity.

LOW TEXT seeks to provide a space for a conversation rather than a celebration of an individual ego. In a sense, this cycle seeks to take a step back from individual authorship by choosing the texts of every day as a point of departure. But this stepping back is at once a step towards it. How can we engage critically with normative texts and claim them back? More info at https://www.facebook.com/lowtext/

Opening Friday, 8 December 2017, 6pm Exhibition 8–17 December 2017, Display, Berlin

The character falls into a hole . . . disappears sonorous scream…[aaaaahhhhhhahhhah]…in the distance, fading out [aaaaaaahhhhhh fading] Just like that – and with this the text stops. The English language differentiates between the terms history and story (narrative). In German, French and Italian, both terms share one word – Geschichte / Histoire / Storia – and consequently disclose a direct reference between both. It is essential to consider that (historical) time is artificial, imaginary, therefore akin to (fictional) narrative. This artificiality allows a linear representation. Shira Wachsmann and Katharina Ludwig are invited by Display, Berlin, to foster a discussion, between their two practices and their two direction of research to explore their points of intersection. As the first part of a series of three events distributed over the coming months, the exhibition Extremity activates the first scenario. Through their common installation in the space, they plan to interrogate the ideas and boundaries of history and story/narrative. How to navigate the factual and fictional? They will engage with the concepts of borders and holes in both the socio-political, as well as artistic and linguistic space.

The project is kindly supported by the Ursula-Wandres-Stiftung.

Extremity Events: Opening: Friday, Dec 8, 2017 - 6pm + performance/reading - 7.30pm

Short films Screening: Monday, Dec 18, 2017, from 7.30pm

Panel discussion: Spring 2018 (more details to come)

DISPLAY Mansteinstr. 16 10738 Berlin +49(0)17679706466 bonjour@ display-berlin.com

http://www.display-berlin.com/#/extremity/

7 November 2017, 7pm, DECAD, Berlin

—Oscar Wilde¹

The third event in the Now, How? series satirically appropriates the name of the Kassel-Athens mega-exhibition for the purposes of posing the question of how critical and participatory distances are explored, created and undermined.

In their open letter in response to the reporting by local newspapers of an $8,300,000.00 budget deficit— attributed by artforum magazine² to “managerial oversights”—the curators of documenta write the following:

we believe it is time to question the value production regime of mega-exhibitions such as documenta. We would like to denounce the exploitative model under which the stakeholders of documenta wish the ‘most important exhibition of the world’ to be produced. The expectations of ever-increasing success and economic growth not only generate exploitative working conditions but also jeopardize the possibility of the exhibition remaining a site of of critical action and artistic experimentation.

Hear, hear! Readers of the Russian anarchist thinker, Mikhail Bakunin, will surely discern the robust Propaganda of the Deed the curators generated to illustrate their point. Schadenfreude-infused levity notwithstanding, the curators’ self-exculpating letter touches on a number of serious points: what is the appropriate amount of money to allocate for a public exhibition, particularly in a time in which discursive complexity is being extirpated by shitposts and tweet-length, gesture politics more generally? How can genuine criticality emerge from institutional models of exhibition and engagement? Who has access to a given space at a given time in the context of a curated project in a public space? How is democracy manifested in the cultural life of a polity?

The artists included in mocumenta do not seek so much to answer these questions, but to deepen them, and to present other questions as well, to ask what is gained and lost by mediated notions of outreach. The format of the event, featuring four live performances in Berlin and four in the UK to be live-streamed between the two locations via the corporate data and image distribution platform, Youtube, holds up a funhouse mirror to the “tale of two cities” narrative at the centre of this year’s documenta extravaganza. The event will also include three video works by the Spanish artist, Irene Pérez-Hernández, the Turkish artist, Özgür Kar, and the Czech artist and publisher, Martin Kohout. mocumenta may not aim to reach as wide an audience as documenta, and it makes no pretence to be as all encompassing or ambitious, but the points the artists included examine are no less pressing (and it is also likely to be a far more cost efficient prospect). If we can learn from each other, both Athenians and Kasselites, then we can also learn from ourselves, particularly from our mistakes.

mocumenta will feature performances by Legacy Russell, Uma Breakdown, Eloise Fornieles, Katharina Ludwig, Gerald Curtis, Alice Jacobs, Nikhil Vettukattil, Lou Cantor, and Felix Riemann.

1. paraphrased from an exchanged between Lord Darlington and Cecil Graham in Lady Windermere’s Fan.

2. to read the full article, follow the link: https://www.artforum.com/news/id=71118

1-15 September, Mehringplatz, Berlin

performances, workshops, and an exhibition at Mehringplatz, Berlin September 1 to 15, 2017

www.whenevertheheartskipsabeat.org

opening & BBQ: 1. September 2017, 15 Uhr

organised by: Marenka Krasomil, Gislind Köhler, Arkadij Koscheew

directions: U-Bahn- und Bushaltestelle Hallesches Tor (U1, U6, 248, M41)

contact: info@whenevertheheartskipsabeat.org

Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat transfers rituals and cultural practices of hospitality into artistic processes. Works by more than twenty international artists, mostly developed specifically for Mehringplatz, intervene into the public space in the form of performances, workshops, and an exhibition taking place at the plaza and in neighbouring stores, making the store-owners hosts of the respective pieces. Mehringplatz, designed by architect Werner Düttmann as an architectural ensemble characteristic of public housing projects of the 1970s, points to a charged relationship due to its position between Friedrichstraße and Bergmannkiez.

Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat aims to open up spaces that are frequently overlooked or perceived as inaccessible because of the supposed coherence of the plaza. It thereby encourages changing the perspective, debating (at) the plaza, highlighting conflicts and influencing them by tackling them with rituals of hospitality. Referring to the piece of the same name by the artists’ collective Raqs Media Collective, presented on billboards at Mehringplatz, Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat takes the susceptibility of the heartbeat to feelings of joy as well as insecurity as a starting point for analyzing individual conceptions and collective actions from different artistic perspectives – politically as well as sociologically – to the end of developing own propositions.

Works and contributions by Ayami Awazuhara, Raqs Media Collective, Calori & Maillard, Nuray Demir, Sara Loeve Dadadottir, EVBG, Alexis Goertz, Lina Hermsdorf, Balz Isler & Justin Kennedy, Jonathan James, Katharina Ludwig, Katharina Marszewski, Kristina Paustian, pcnc_bay, Tabita Rezaire, Shirin Sabahi, Maya Schweizer, Hanae Utamura, Shira Wachsmann, Miriam Yammad, Salah Zater u. a.

Gefördert durch Spartenoffene Förderung („City Tax“) und Aktionsfonds Mehringplatz

11 May 2017, Bank Space Gallery, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street, London

DOW Collective would like to invite you to their inaugural exhibition THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT TO SUCK Participating artists Catherine Biocca / Byzantia Harlow / Pil & Galia Kollectiv / Katharina Ludwig / Luke Overin / Ricardo Passaporte / Sophie Rogers Stimulated by the question “What if…?”, the exhibition suggests scenarios post-present, proposing alternative- unexpected- futures. The exhibition will look to a time where small decentralised communities reclaim the concept of development from larger centralised powers; and reinterpret it through the reappropriation of materials. Both national and international artists question the plausibility of a future where development has superseded itself and production has ceased. Setting the tone and overall narrative for the show, Katharina Ludwig will present a commissioned text. Part-prediction, part-sermon, a warning of what has / is / will happen. The text will be performed at 18.30 and again at 19.30 during the opening night.

11 November 2016, Herrman Germann Contemporary, Zurich

What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had the flower in your hand Ah, what then? — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 18. Jahrhundert The 21st century is often named the digital age. In the early 2000s we were already talking about the Post-Internet era. Everyone born after 1980 counts as a »digital native«. Digital natives seem to move effortlessly through spaces, overcoming national borders and social hierarchies. Yet are the phenomena generally credited to the digital revolution really new? Does Coleridge’s poem from the 18th Century not suggest instead that the creation of virtual worlds is a quality inherent to the human imagination? Do I not experience emotions stirred by digital media just as keenly as I do those aroused by direct, physical experience? The exhibition Ghost Flowers at Herrmann Germann Contemporary is an undertaking to break down boundaries between virtual and real, digital and analogue and to explore both levels as experiential spaces on equal terms. The Internet will, thus, become an additional public space that we can inhabit and design. The role-play and alter egos which define life on the net are a key element of Riley Harmon’s artistic practice. According to Harmon, the unconscious knows no difference between reality and simulation. Here images, music and dreams are dealt with like real facts. In his film A Method for Blue Logic voices off read a collage of lines Harmon sourced from an online forum, leading through dream-like visual sequences. The voices discuss a conspiracy theory that the American government has employed an actress to be a national hero. A young blond woman sings a cover of the old jazz standardGeorgia on my mind. While Harmon is engaged with role-play and myths, Nora Mertes investigates our physical appreciation of spaces and images in her spatial interventions and installations. Her works are often like experimental arrangements in which the viewer plays an active part as an observing and observable body. Marie von Heyl bridges the sensory experience of objects and their virtual adaption. »We have no empathy with objects that give away how they were made. […] Craft bores us«, writes the artist in her Alien Object Manifesto. Her focus on surfaces is also apparent in The Occasional Table Series. Everyday objects covered with grey spray-paint look at a first glance as if they might be computer generated. Only on a closer look do small »flaws« or unevenness become visible. The misused use-objects exist somewhere on the cusp of being and seeming, between practicality and fetish. The collaborative work Countdown Belladonna by Anna K. E. and Florian Meisenberg enables the viewer to look through the artist’s eyes in a true sense. Both videos show close-up footage of K. E. and Meisenberg’s eyes as they look at the displays of their smartphones. YouTube films, dance performances, music videos and film excerpts are seen in reflection on their pupils. The videos have a highly intimate and yet strange effect, as they bear witness to the nature of interpersonal relationships as well as the potential, though also the dangers, of the latest technical developments. The window to the soul here becomes an interface, while divergences such as man and machine, body and soul, are nullified. A further leitmotif that runs through the exhibition is that of language. In her films, installations and objectsKatharina Ludwig investigates the narrative structures that define our lives and that maintain power relationships. While objects serve her as sketches for the conceptual development of her installations, words find intuitive entry points in the works. Instead of explaining or describing, language here creates space for multi-layered interpretative approaches. This vague and veiled method of dealing with language can also be found in Maude Léonard-Contant’s works. The texts in which the sculptor describes the material qualities and the forms and colours of not-yet-realised objects have a bewildering rather than clarifying effect. Here language becomes a virtual medium that forms new bodies. Léonard-Contant’s objects will be exhibited together with the related texts for the first time in the exhibition Ghost Flowers. http://www.herrmanngermann.com/

26 February 2016, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Sabine Bokelberg, Bert Didillon, Thomas Fischer, Lothar Götz, Katharina Ludwig, Marie von Heyl

6 November 2015 7pm -10pm, Grand Union, 19 Minerva Works Fazeley Street Birmingham B5 5RS Tapas and cocktails (made by the amazing chefs of Nomad) and I'm doing a quasi-performance/reading

curated by Lea Schleiffenbaum & Anne Schwarz

Salon Dahlmann

Marburger Str 3

10789 Berlin

9 May – 8 June, Museum Haus Hövener, Kunstverein östliches Sauerland, Brilon, Germany

Katharina Ludwig and Christoph Mause