Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce our sixth exhibition with the collaborative team of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick titled Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate.

When you look through the porthole of your berth aboard the ship, what do you see? The raging ocean? Distant clouds? A lone iceberg? When you stand on the deck and look through a telescope, what do you see? The future? The past? An undiscovered shoreline? A drowning man? The truppe fledermaus invite you to look through the peep hole where you shall find scenes of men and women trying to parse that which is to come, speak with those departed, or just finding their pleasure amid the florid decay of a world in decline.

Kahn & Selesnick’s latest project “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate” continues the adventures of the Truppe Fledermaus, a cabaret troupe of would-be mystics who catalogue their absurdist attempts to augur a future that seems increasingly in peril due to environmental pressures and global turmoil. In this body of work, the artists also examine the notion of the carnivalesque. During such brief times of anarchy, societal pressures were relieved by revealing their absurd and arbitrary natures. Costumes and masks were worn so that people might have the same social status during the duration of the festival. The Truppe ask you to consider: is it the carnival that is upside-down, or perhaps the real world that it purports to burlesque?

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. Kahn & Selesnick have participated in exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 20 collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, they have published 3 books with Aperture Press,and their latest book 100 Views of the Drowning World was released in 2017 by Candela Books.