By other tongues, by the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people*

Within Jean-Ulrick Désert’s practice there is no simple way to distinguish between the beginnings, closures, departures and arrivals. There are complex trajectories of movements leading through conceptual edifices of cultural signifiers, sharp observations of emotional burdens within the banal everyday and spiritual insights into the spheres of myths and the divine. All these with lightness, humor and honesty. We are grateful  to host and carry a set of artistic practices of Jean-Ulrick Désert, who embraces the diasporic experience as a power which allows us to flee from fixed categories and to avoid confining traps of externally imposed identities. 

We warmly invite you to join the closing event in the light and shadow of the exhibition CONSPICUOUS INVISIBILITY – a moment also of an opening, a point of departure we arrived at in order to continue the conversation. Please come by for a conversation of Jean-Ulrick Désert with Edna Bonhomme, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Renan Laru-an, and a celebration of the abundance of the artist’s work.

JEAN-ULRICK DÉSERT is a Haitian born conceptual and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Désert’s artworks vary in form: public billboards, actions, paintings, site-specific sculptures, video and art objects. They emerge from a tradition of conceptual work engaged with social and cultural practices.

Well known for his provocative as well as poetic projects, he has exhibited widely at venues such as The Grand Palais in France, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum of Harlem and Walker Art Center in the USA, The Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Bunkier Sztuki in Poland, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt, SAVVY Contemporary in Germany and in galleries and public venues in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Ghent, Brussels, Dakar and Havana Biennials. He is the recipient of awards, public commissions, private philanthropy, including LMCC (USA) the Villa Waldberta-Munich, Kulturstiftung der Länder (Germany) and Cité des Arts (France). He received his bachelor and masters in architecture at the Cooper Union and Columbia University (New York) and has been an invited lecturer and critic at universities in the United States (Princeton, Yale, Columbia), Germany (Humboldt University in Berlin) and in France (at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris). He previously advised and taught for Trans Art Institute (based in New York). Désert was selected by the Minister of Culture as the solo artist to represent the Haiti pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) in Venice Italy.