Readings

 

PROGRAM

 

Luzie Meyer
Besaid, bedone

 

In the performative reading Besaid, bedone (2026), Luzie Meyer approaches the life and circumstances of the Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi through the form of a speculative interior monologue. The starting point is the lament aria Che si può fare, in which feelings of powerlessness and dwilling hope are articulated. Through pointed linguistic ruptures, Meyer layers historical and contemporary spheres and inquiries into the conditions that shape agency and autonomy. As one of the few women to emerge publicly as a composer in seventeenth-century Venice, Strozzi occupied a position marked by social dependency and precarious circumstances. By overlaying with contemporary forms of social and economic dependency, the historical situation becomes legible as an enduring structure. The reading thus opens up a poetic space for reflection on the possibility of self-determination within constrained conditions of agency.
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Luzie Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and translator who lives and works in Berlin. Grounded in a genre-crossing writing practice, Meyer produces videos, sound-pieces, photographic installations, and performative readings. With conceptual and improvisational approaches, she suffuse existing logics with visual, sonic, and semantic ruptures. Textual practices of quotation, fragmentation, and recomposition allow narrative constellations to emerge in which history becomes legible as layering, condensation, and displacement, rather than being narrated in linear fashion.

 

 

Anna R. Winder
I sometimes think of her as a spider

 

Anna R. Winder reads from a text in progress that chronicles her own amateur detective-researcher endeavors, drawing on the anecdote as a mode of inquiry. Following the search for a photograph known only through hearsay, allegedly published in Playboy sometime between 1969 and 1981, the text evokes fictional characters engaged in similar pursuits: Hazel Brown from Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, Janine Dakyns from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Charles Kinbote from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Daniel Quinn from Paul Auster’s City of Glass, among others. They are detective-researcher-authors whose passions for their investigations ultimately outgrows the bounds of their work.
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Anna R. Winder is an artist, author, bookseller, and publisher based in Berlin. Her artistic practice is marked by an interest in forms of publishing, translation, and speculation. Literary texts, oddities, and idiosyncrasies often form the starting point for her photographic and installation works. These explore processes of transmission and reception, including their narrative and poetic potential.

 

 

Karolin Meunier
Scenes of Translation

 

Karolin Meunier will present her artist book Commentaries. Vai pure, Carla Lonzi, which is currently being published by b_books.
The work is based on Meunier’s engagement with a text by the Italian art historian and feminist Carla Lonzi: In Vai pure (Milan, 1980), Lonzi published a conversation with her partner, the artist Pietro Consagra. Building on the question of how to translate a book written in a language she does not speak, Meunier creates a space in which translation is recognized as a dialogic practice and initiates a polyphonic conversation with other contributors. Reading, listening, transcription, and editing thus become aesthetic practices of transmission through which the text of Vai pure is newly approached in an ongoing process of exchange. At the same time this process offers different perspectives on the historical context of Lonzi’s writing, raising questions about art, productivity, recognition, and feminism today.
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Karolin Meunier is an artist and writer who lives in Berlin and teaches in Basel. Her performance, text, and video works explore how individual access to experience is formed by cultural and standardized practices. Her projects are often created in collaborative contexts and describe an artistic practice which incorporates dialogue, translation processes, and methods of writing and learning.

 

 

The readings are taking place as part of the current exhibition read to/for | I read to sense the doubling of time. The exhibition understands itself as a space for production and experimentation, in which installations, readings, and performances enter into shifting constellations with one another, over the course of the exhibition.

 

No registration is required. Free admission.

 

The project is funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), and Kunststiftung NRW.