Openings May 10: Ei Arakawa/Nikolas Gambaroff//Boltenstern.Raum: Will Benedict/Julie Verhoeven

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EI ARAKAWA / NIKOLAS GAMBAROFF
BODYCARD TESTIMONIALS

The exhibition Bodycard Testimonials by Ei Arakawa (*1977, lives in New York) and Nikolas
Gambaroff (*1979, lives in New York) circles around a card-game, consisting of 325 Two-
Alphabet Monograms.

„One will pat the 25 randomly drawn cards on four different parts of one’s body: Head, ♥,
Gut, and Below. The result is your Two-Alphabet Monogram self-portrait, that is Bodycard
Testimonial. With this testimonial being voiced out in different abstract modes, one can
consult the cards of and on your past, present and future: any questions and concerns.“

Although Arakawa is working always in performance, Gambaroff on the other hand mainly
within painting, both share a common interest in the interrogation of language, its social,
psychological, and formal structures. Two-Alphabet Monograms are tools to ST IR UP AN
IN TE RS UB JE CT IV EP OE TR YO CE AN. Their project for Galerie Meyer Kainer was
developed from this perspective and is comprised of new works of the artists.
In their collaboration, which started in 2008, Arakawa and Gambaroff have been working
periodically on different instantiations of the Two-Alphabet Monograms. Set up as a
dysfunctional written and spoken language in 2009 the project stays in constant flux and
found different formal and material existences in performances, sounds, installations,
objects, architecture, and speech-lessons.

At Galerie Meyer Kainer, Two-Alphabet Monograms are arranged like dwellings of poets,
or quasi MVRDV buildings. Surrounding those sets of buildings are inflatable men, us the
viewers, the men with holes (i.e. on Gut), and bodycardmen interrogating our ♥s.

Ei Arakawa and Nikolas Gambaroff are currently exhibiting the complete Two-Alphabet
Monograms flags at “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language“ at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York.

Openings: May 10 at 7 pm

Duration of the exhibitions: 11.5.-16.6. 2012

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