The figure of the ghostwriter—like a body double or shadow self—touches the fragile threshold between who we are and how we are perceived by others, between the stories we tell ourselves and the ways others inscribe us into their memories.
Embodying a kind of haunting, spectral presence, where another’s voice and agency subtly inhabit one’s space, the ghostwriter challenges the clear boundaries of the individual subject or author.
Throughout his life-long practice, Michel Auder has used the moving image to reflect on his own life, New York’s artistic milieu, and the world at large, often recording semi-staged performances and portraits of fellow artists from the downtown scene. His eye and his camera, in a Proustian sense, serve as instruments for capturing reality, while his ever-shifting approach to archive and memory organizes events into fluid, evolving realms of meaning.
This exhibition brings together traces, meshes, and specters of various poetic exercises, where ghostwriting—understood here loosely and fleetingly as a shadow of the self—becomes a way to practice distortion, unsettling both authenticity and the very concept of identity.
At the entrance to the gallery, Auder presents Chasing the Dragon (1982), a fictional autobiography in which a day from the artist’s life—filtered, edited, mediated, and performed by another actor—becomes the “ghost” of the person, a doubled identity that can never fully capture its subject. The work also conjures the spectral presence of a long-gone New York City, an uncanny body-double on the verge of austerity and collapse.
The film Meshes of Derivatives (2025) explores emerging technology as a ghostwriting apparatus, where the vast archives amassed by our phones and the algorithmic organization of memory orchestrate a constant transformation of remembering and forgetting, choice and interpretation.
Finally, two new films—Hunters and Michelangelo by Michelauder (2025)—draw on personal imagery, existing works re-filmed by the artist, found footage, and material exchanged with the author of this text. These works direct the viewer toward the iconography of power and submission. By presenting art historical motifs in a dialogue with his characteristic subjective narration and a contemporary visual atlas, Auder offers surprising insights into the notions of erotic and spiritual self-abandonment. He explores these questions through the interchangeability of power roles and radical vulnerability, as seen in the depictions of Michelangelo’s captives and sleeping subjects. His lens lingers on states of total absorption in sleep and defenselessness, on folds of marble, heavy eyelids, and parted lips. Equality, dedication, and surrender intertwine in this hot mess, decoding different modes of being together with others. Here perhaps, we are all ghosts writing someone else's story.
