The Red House in the East Village is a very special place with an unique past. Swiss actress Linda Geiser took over the place in 1979 and started soon after to invite different Swiss artists to stay and work at a then new established studio space in the Red House. For over 35 years writers, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers and directors have come here to work, to mingle with the local artists, to get inspiration from being in New York. Today the Red House hosts three studios and apartments for Swiss artists.

Swiss based artists Lisa Biedlingmaier and Brigitte Lustenberger who stay at the Red House at present have curated a group show on the premises of the Red House. The Show brings together both Swiss and New York based, both emerging and established artists and emphasizes the spirit of the Red House to bring together two different art scenes.

Bedtime Stories is a collaboration with my mother that expands on the notion of the childhood tradition and considers the longterm transfer of knowledge from mother to son. Taking the form of an audio/visual encyclopedia, the project addresses a variety of historical topics that my mother is passionate about, many of which she began researching during her PH.D at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London. These include The Mughal Empire, The Parsi People, The Mahabharata, Shakespeare, The British Royals, Gandhi, the Salt March of 1930, and the Quit India Movement among others.

My mother and I discuss these topics during recorded phone conversations. The resulting dialogues are edited into lectures and paired with rapid-fire slideshows sourced from google image results. Hundreds of keywords pulled from the lectures are visualized, providing a collective counterpoint to the intimacy of my mother’s pedagogy.

As the viewer listens to my mother’s lecture, the slideshows that appear directly relate to the words she is saying, adding an overwhelming amount of ‘related’ imagery to supplement her vocal content. This juxtaposition highlights two vastly divergent learning strategies, one more traditional and lecture based, the other related more to the kind of hyper-fast learning utilized by the characters in “The Matrix”.