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, parasitized, and shattered huge labyrinth game with viral potential, without apparent rules, to be applied to a wall of the gallery.
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 organized by the French colonial Empire in the 18th century, as a prototype of an industrial and capitalist organization. Ludovic Bernhardt’s graphics related to the fall in global finance stock markets during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, are also featured in The Gaming Room, in the form of wallpapers and hand-made tapestries. A poetics is 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.
