COURTESY BHQFU
Since 2013, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University has lorded over Avenue A in a spacious second-floor loft between East 2nd and East 3rd streets, with the letters BHQFU plastered on the windows for all below to see. Last April it “expanded the campus” (their term) of the university by opening FUG (Foundation University Gallery) in a basement on East 6th Street.
But the East Village mini-empire is no more, as the wily semi-anonymous collective has consolidated all its entities in the sixth-floor studio space in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that it acquired in 2012.
To inaugurate the space, there’s a show from the collective House of Ladosha that opens January 15, which is explained in this bit of a press release:
House of Ladosha’s second exhibition, titled This is UR Brain, will dive deeper into their shared vocabulary for the social and political signifiers of race, gender, sexuality and salient power in the information age. Manipulating, dissecting and remaking language via image, text and performance is the DNA of “Ladosha culture.” Themes of “cunt life,” habitual anxiety and escapism will be addressed through series of performative videos and mixed media works that begin to map a bizarre terrain into the fragmented landscapes of contemporary identity.
The move was perhaps precipitated by rising rents in a gentrified East Village. But their new neighborhood may someday soon look not so different: last week, a party for the Bruce High Quality Foundation in their new headquarters was mentioned in a New York Times Styles Section trend piece about the hipness of Sunset Park.