Bau Haus Semi-Annual VI: Hello, World!

Bau Haus in collaboration with Codify Art is pleased to present Hello, World!, featuring work by Jarrett Key, Jon Key, Sharina Gordon, Son Kit, and Wael Morcos. This exhibition will be on view for one night only during the opening reception: Saturday, November 11, 7–10PM.


Hello, World!

@Bau Haus, 516 Bainbridge St. #1L Brooklyn, NY

November 11, 2017

When learning a new programming language, tradition dictates that one begins by writing a “Hello, World!” program. It is a simple script, used to illustrate the basic syntax of the language, and the successful output of “Hello, World!” by the computer marks the first instance of communication between human and machine. 

For writers, artists, or anybody disposed to imagination, world-building contains a similar moment of first contact: one constructs an entrance into a visionary space, and the space offers itself up for introduction. Determining the rules of the world thereafter feels less like an exercise in creation and more an exploratory relationship, in which the roles of architect and adventurer are conflated or confused.

Does one create a world by imagining it? Or does the world precede the imagination, which only allows access to it? In either case, how does one measure agency? 

This question dogs the steps of speculative fiction, so often the venue for playing out scenarios we cannot will into our existence. Is it a concession, a capitulation, to have to escape elsewhere than one’s actual life, one’s physical life, the systems one is born into? Is it, instead, an act of power, where one manifests the world one sees for the rest us to reckon with?

Rather than offering direct answers, the work in Hello, World! is the promised introduction into worlds that engage the questions. In landscapes, soundscapes, artifacts, and ecosystems, Hello, World! examines the ways in which we interpret, navigate, exert control over or are destroyed by the lives we imagine for ourselves.


BAU HAUS is a live/work project and process space located in Bed-Stuy. Alternately called a studio, an exhibition venue, halfway house, community lab, conceptual incubator, and a great party, Bau Haus is committed to works-in-progress and proofs of concept in the spirit of experimentation, self-exploration, and accessibility. The Bau Haus Semi-Annual Show happens twice a year and features work that has never been shown anywhere else; it is less a culmination of the artists’ work thus far and more an invitation into dialogue regarding works to come. Bau Haus is inhabited and run by Jarrett Key and Son Kit.

The “Bau” in “Bau Haus” is a derivative of “boo” and akin to “darling,” not to be confused with the German school, “Bauhaus.”