Swedish-born, Berlin-based artist Karl Holmqvist uses a wide range of formats – poetry readings, installation and sculpture — to bring out the primal qualities of language. In his hands, news articles, conversation snippets, and pop lyrics form a textual mesh and blend into a multiplicity of private indictments, incitements, and convictions, decoding and recoding the experiential and communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing. The reading by Karl Holmqvist was part of the exhibition Class Languages. Exhibition, Magazine, Debate, on view from November 11, 2017 – February 4, 2018 at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Class Languages at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande and Westfalen was the second station of a long- term collaborative project. It was launched with an exhibition and a debate program at District Berlin as well as Issue Zero of a collective journal in summer 2017 with the generous support of Hauptstadtkulturfonds. In continuation of these activities the Kunstverein presented an extension of the project with lectures, workshops, and performances, aiming at furthening the Berlin discussions in Düsseldorf. With Kai Althoff / Isa Genzken, Gerry Bibby, Cana Bilir-Meier, CAConrad, Michaela Eichwald, Frank Engster, Fehras Publishing Practices, Sarah M. Harrison, Danny Hayward, Ann Hirsch, Karl Holmqvist, Infofiction, Stephan Janitzky, Jutta Koether, Justin Lieberman, Hanne Lippard, Thomas Locher, Karolin Meunier, Johannes Paul Raether, Aykan Safoğlu, spot the silence, Josef Strau, Hans Stützer, Linda Stupart, Ryan Trecartin, Marina Vishmidt, Peter Wächtler, Ian White, Tanja Widmann. A project initiated by Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall, Kerstin Stakemeier, and Stephanie Weber. Exhibition design together with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga.

The presentation of the video documentation is part of our endeavour to activate the Kunstverein's new website not only as an archive, but as much as a site of participation, debate and production. In addition to announcements of events and exhibitions, it will offer documentations, ephemera, archive records as well as new artistic productions from the Kunstverein's long history.