Sophia Le Fraga
Other Titles
Readings by Karl Holmqvist, Shiv Kotecha & Sophia Le Fraga
It is with great excitement that BDP announces an exhibition by Sophia Le Fraga. Four years after her show as part of the Exhibiting Literature series, Other Titles sees the artist and poet return to Büro BDP with a new body of work. For BDP, Le Fraga offers a pertinent questioning of the relationship between not only publishing and digital technology but also contemporary visual art practice. How exactly is text different on a screen than on a page? And what becomes of that page when it is extended in space? We are used to experiencing other forms such as music and film in the digital realm and online, but what becomes of a book when it is presented in full, for free, for immediate consummation? Or when a digitalized book or work of literature should itself be thought of spatially, much as Concrete Poetry tried to envisage the paginated work in the mid 20th century.
Other Titles is made up of artworks with various methodologies used by the artist: from appropriation, punning and wordplay, translation, recontextualizing – visual, semantic, linguistic and conversion – that feed into an intense consideration of poetry in the digital age. The video piece Waiting for instance is a translation as well as a recoding of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, imagining the back and forth of Estragon and Vladimir as series of text messages, a condensation of one the last century’s great condensers, re-stimulating the history of literature at the same time as unlocking the potentials of current everyday practices.
Le Fraga’s practice belongs squarely in a new age of poetic engagement with the modes and manners of contemporary communication, using a vocabulary recognisable from everyday Internet use which in turn is married to a semantics inherited from Concrete Poetry, text art and broader modes of conceptualism. Skirting the intersection of this conceptualism in both visual art and that of more recent writing (that being literature, if we so wish to call it), Le Fraga offers fresh energy and engagement in a zone that is more relevant than ever and yet in danger of being sidestepped when considering how text and literature – for so long bound to the printed codex – can exist in our time.
Sophia Le Fraga is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET (KTBAFC, 2012); I RL, YOU RL (minuteBOOKS, 2013; Troll Thread 2014) and literallydead (Spork, 2015), as well as the anti-plays W8ING and TH3 B4LD 50PR4N0. Recent exhibitions include "Miami Project" (Miami, FL), "Paris Photo" (Paris), "Itself Not So" (Lisa Cooley, New York, NY), "The Printed Room" (SALTS, Basel) and "Online/Offline: Encoding Everyday Life" (Vorspiel Transmediale, Berlin), as well as the upcoming "Eugen Gomringer &" at Bielefelder Kunstverein. She is the poetry editor for Imperial Matters and teaches at BHQFU, New York's freest art school.
Büro BDP
Mareschstrasse 1, 12055, Berlin
List of artworks
Other Tiles, 44 sheets, stamped, 2015
Berlin Fest – 1, paper, silver acrylic paint, 2015
SEXT 1-3, typeset text on canvas, 2015
W8ING, digital video played on iPad, 9’22”, 2014
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, 45 page book, edition 100, 2012