Reading

Letters

Part I

read with Eva Budniewski

7th August 2021

4 - 5 pm and 6 - 7 pm

Please register to attend

Reading

Letters

Part II

read with Eva Budniewski

4th September 2021

4 - 5 pm and 6 - 7 pm

Please register to attend

Meeting point at the Trauerweide next to the villa

Anna Budniewski develops site-specific installations that act as settings for her texts. In terms of content, she critically questions processes that generate the value of art and artistic work. Some years ago, Anna Budniewski met the artist-duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, who gave her a copy of the book Letters, in which the two artists summarize parts of the Schmela family’s extensive gallery correspondence in English. With their selections, the book brings Monika and Ulrike Schmela’s strategic, entrepreneurial, but also emotional management to the fore. The short, sober texts give a sense of both women’s everyday working life, marked by the trials and tribulations of carrying on a small art imperium in the male-dominated art world of the 1980s and 90s. 

Aiming to reveal the direct and indirect approaches that are hidden between the lines, Anna Budniewski re-formulates the correspondence afresh. In more than two hundred written letters, every day Budniewski works precisely along the thin line between professional alliances, personal relationships, and complex entanglements, which characterize the field of art. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the artist will read these letters publicly, alongside her sister, Eva Budniewski.