SANATORIUM presents Ludovic Bernhardt's solo exhibition Fool's Cap Map of the World, from December 26, 2025 to February 7, 2026. Working at the intersection of visual art and poetic writing, Ludovic Bernhardt takes a 1580 engraving as the conceptual foundation for this exhibition.
Fool's Cap Map of the World (Monde dans un tête de fou, O caput elleboro dignum) depicts a court jester whose face has been replaced by a heart-shaped world map inspired by the era's master cartographers. This historical work comments on humanity's folly and its presumption to comprehend and control the world through representation, questioning which is more foolish: the world itself, or the fool who bears it. Functioning as a vanitas, it reminds viewers of the boundaries and irrationality of human knowledge.
More than four centuries later, Bernhardt presents an aesthetic, poetic, and political meditation on the madness that pervades and "governs" our contemporary world and its representations. Each work and installation forms a fragment expressing what defines us as homo sapiens, homo demens, and ultimately homo sapiens demens—the 'wise madman.'
Developed in parallel with a contemporary poetry manuscript of the same title, the exhibition unfolds as a heterogeneous kaleidoscope without homogeneous unity. Videos filmed by robots in Fukushima, yoga mats inscribed with Martian writing, a grammar book for robots and monkeys, an old raft equipped with printers generating poem fragments at a distance, a financial diagram tracking oil prices, a destroyed classroom, a cactus listening to smartphone sounds, a post-internet puzzle titled Sadness, a pseudo-totalitarian psychedelic planetary diagram called We Are All Lost (after USCO), an unbalanced world-cradle, and audio tapes with recordings from the Dead Internet—all dialogue through a fabric of relationships akin to a rebus awaiting decipherment.
The exhibition challenges our representations of the world in an era where cartographic and diagrammatic certainties have dissolved. Rather than a conventional exhibition, Bernhardt reveals a work of writing in flux, a process of hybridization between visual art and poetic writing that expresses the madness shaping our contemporary lives.
Opening: Friday, December 26, 2025, 18:00 - 20:00
Opening: Friday, December 26, 2025, 18:00 - 20:00
SANATORIUM, Emekyemez Mahallesi, Abdussalah Sokak, No:3, 34421 Beyoğlu, Istanbul
About the artist:
Positioned at the intersection of contemporary art, research, and writing, Ludovic Bernhardt explores how art and text intertwine, using a wide range of media including installations, books, critical cartography, digital works, public readings, and curatorial projects. He is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art in France.
Alongside his artistic practice and various solo exhibitions, Bernhardt has co-curated exhibitions including Map, Play, Game (2024), Fragments of a Hologram Rose (2019), and Hyphologie (2013), and has published books such as Le lac [fac-similé] (éd. LansKine), Réacteur 3 Fukushima (éd. LansKine), Work Bitch (Jou éd.), and Inversion (éd. Gravitons).
