The Office for Curating

Introduction

The talk According to an Office Desk – An Introduction to The Office for Curating introduced the offices’ more recent and ongoing activities, aims and the ideologies embedded within its curating and writing practices to an audience in Tallinn, Estonia. The event is organised by Rebeka Põldsam, as part of the events programme of the Center for Contemporary Art Estonia (CCAE).

Introduction

The presentation According to an Office Desk II, subtitled The Call of the Bowerbird as a Curatorial and Representational Device puts forward the intricacies of the Bowerbird’s mating call in which objects (findings) are assembled, arranged and staged in order to reflect back on oneself, to create an appeal for being the right partner. From this position, the presentation diverges slightly to human nature and touches upon a similar dynamic as present within the curating and writing practices of The Office for Curating, as headed by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk. Furthermore, the presentation touches upon the notions of Zuhandenheit (ready-to-hand) and Vorhandenheit (present-at-hand) in relation to the objects and texts assembled by The Office, their redistribution in the shape of different curatorial formats, as well as the idea of having a unified and continuous sense of practice by instigating an office structure to move away from the “independent” self and applying a generic name and a seemingly fictitious facade instead.

This presentation forms part of Qui. Enter Atlas 2013, the fifth symposium of emerging curators. The event is hosted by GAMeC (Bergamo, Italy), organised by Giacinto Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi, and conducted by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis.

Introduction

The work Acts of Annotation – Background Noise consists of a short essay and a vinyl piece commenting on the transition and structural shift from the space of the book to the space of the exhibition. In that, the text – annotating a number of movements, from a Brutalist flat in London to an apartment in Rotterdam, from the cages of birds in an Amsterdam zoo to a sound carrier made audible in an exhibition space in Rome – becomes the script for positing an ambiguity within the exhibition, and the documentation thereof, more specifically. The sounds of birds, as played from the adjacent record player, come to stand for a graspable and thinkable, albeit problematic dimension: the distribution of the sensible beyond material and physical properties, as well as a conflict between a lawless nature and artificially constructed gridlines.

The work forms part of the exhibition AB by Gabriele de Santis, which began as a project on paper, and has now expanded into three dimensions at Nomas Foundation in Rome. The AB book has been used as a boomerang, which has in turn created a complete circle of dimensions – perhaps more than three. Using the original travel mates of the journey, and other hitchhikers along the way, a map has been generated. Artworks become orientation points in the space; landmarks used to navigate courses of thoughts in the exhibition. The instalment and the production of a rhythm of an exhibition are equatable to the contours of territories on an atlas…

Introduction

Review written on the occasion of the exhibition Adorno’s Grey by Hito Steyerl at Wilfried Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam. The review was published on the website of Metropolis M.

Read the review here.

Introduction

Introduction

Exhibition review written on the occasion of Aleksandra Domanovic’s presentation at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, as part of their ongoing series within the frame of Sensory Spaces. The text was published in Metropolis M Issue 5, October–November 2015.

Introduction

For her exhibition All Begins With A, Janneke van der Putten (1985, lives and works in Rotterdam) presents a number of recent and ongoing works in which the relationship between sound, voice and singing, as well as the human body, time and space are investigated through her personal experiences, physicality, and voice. The lengthy walks, tours and listening studies that Van der Putten conducts are an important starting point for her work. In that she makes use of her voice as an instrument to scan and articulate a particular situation and space, and thereby allow an environment’s often-hidden features to be foregrounded and experienced. The work is often driven by the rhythms of nature and the transitions of day and night. Hence, Van der Putten’s practice could be considered as a form of psychogeography: she establishes relationships between herself and external, given realities, such as a cemetery in Rotterdam, the isle of Vassivière, Lima’s urban environment, or the desert coast of Peru, and engages in direct relationships with sonic phenomena such as bird sounds, gunshots, and echoes.

Introduction

The duo–exhibition All the Pieces, Back Together with Elena Damiani and Frauke Dannert, curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, revolves around recent works from the artists’ practices, focussing specifically on the possibilities of expanding collage into the space of sculpture and installation. In that, the exhibition is sought to comment on the fragmented nature of collage, in the light of its potential dimensionality when thought and approached spatially, architecturally. In so doing, the works themselves, rather than the gallery space, will become the support structure and stage for a more immersed and cinematic way of looking at fragments, materials and objects that become sequences within a comprehensive environment.

Introduction

The Beetsterzwaag Triennial is a multi-day art event organised every three years by Kunsthuis SYB, taking place at various locations in and around Beetsterzwaag. The first triennial originated in 2015 and was titled Sfear fan Ynset. With this second edition we continue the original objective: to show and present a multitude of artistic positions and works of art, both from former residents of Kunsthuis SYB and invited artists, in unconventional presentation spaces.

This edition is titled Almende – The Second Triennial of Beetsterzwaag. ‘Almende’ is a term from the Middle Ages which originally bears the meaning of the common share a population group or municipality holds in the meadows, forests and fishing waters that were not privately owned, and that were often used for cattle breeding, logging, hunting and fishing. In light of Leeuwarden-Fryslân 2018 and its overarching theme ‘iepen mienskip’ (open community), we want to use the term ‘almende’ to question the idea of an open community and further expand it into a more inclusive zone, shared between both humans and non-humans, the living and the inert, the organic and the inorganic. What does it mean to be interdependent or to bear a collective responsibility for a shared living environment in which humans are no longer central? Can we, in collaboration with other animals and forms of life, think about a more sustainable society?

Introduction

As our relationship with technology is ever more intimate and pervasive, its influence deeply entrenched within the human living complex, it seems increasingly difficult, even impossible to uphold the artificial separation line between nature and technology. Nevertheless (conscious) organic matter is in need of an environment enabling its subsistence over time, where it would be difficult to imagine the human body surviving in conditions intolerable to its material consistency. This does not entail the human body is ‘natural’ by any means: the slabs of matter that we inhabit are equally the outcome of cultural and technological processes. However, if the human body is to be deemed a cultural-technological construct, it will always still be in need of an environment with conditions that make its reproduction and mobility possible. This ultimately concerns a discussion of the relationship between consciousness and evolution, for which the latter has had its obvious effect on consciousness. Concerning the reverse: could one imagine consciousness acting out on the evolutionary process? At the heart of this discussion one may locate the artistic practice of Antye Guenther, actively revolving around questions of how to adapt the human body and neural system—through the lens of science (fiction) and technology—to the changing and mutating environment, in relation to nonhuman and non-biological modes of existence.

The text And the neuroplastician said, you peel away all the layers of the onion and there’s nothing in the center was commissioned by Antye Guenther for her new website.

Introduction

The exhibition Archipelago — A Problem (On Exactitude in Science) centres around a fictitious, mental archipelago where a group of mathematicians, geologists, cartographers and other scientists try to index the measurable facets and phenomenological manifestations that they uncover during their research expedition. As the unprecedented landscape is subject to constant change and fluctuations, the advanced instruments with which the research group is equipped prove to be unsuited to recording and documenting their observations and findings accurately. The scientific languages they employed elsewhere do not appear to correspond in any way to their somewhat predetermined, stable patterns of expectation, preconceived knowledges and epistemological registers: the diversity of living conditions and environments found within the archipelago appears so diverse and unstable that every island seems to require its own individual linguistic and scientific approach. To this end they decide to develop a new compendium entitled The Sea Island Mathematical Manual in order to do justice to a world of constant change using a series of–to use philosopher Donna Haraway’s words–SFs (science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation, so far).

The observation of natural phenomena is an exercise in perception and representation that is contested on many levels: from the accurate use of measuring equipment to the social and political exploitation of information. Archipelago — A Problem (On Exactitude in Science) investigates how the composition of artistic practices can represent the negotiation and slippages between scientific and non-scientific knowledge production by measuring the impact of climate change in times in which stable backdrops have ceased to exist. Searching for new relational templates and approaches in inter-agentivity between humans and non-humans, the exhibition aims to advocate for the loosening of thought from the constraints of human phenomenality, as structures of being do not necessarily correspond with structures of lived experience.

In that sense, the exhibition assembles a diverse range of artistic practices and works that confront our tendency to endow the human figure with the capacity to be at the basis of the reconstruction of entities we perceptively and empirically encounter. The exhibition aims to destabilise our self-imposed central role within the scheme of things. Moving from the loss of the seemingly objective to its recovery in the field of fiction, the exhibition is an invitation to navigate and chronicle a mental archipelago that is constantly becoming but never quite arriving. Here we can no longer poke the things we encounter with a stick in order to see what they have to say or–for that matter–employ our measuring instruments to make deductions solely corresponding to our own anthropocentric logic. Life on the archipelago is one of embodiment, of applying oneself and working through and with sympoiesis (to make and world-with conjointly), towards languages that were never our islands in the first place. Instead of resting all too comfortably in our category, we may as well develop navigational tools and translation tables for a different logic found in the relations inter-se things.

Introduction

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Curated by_Vienna 2012, titled Art of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics. The book features a foreword by Bettina Leidl and texts by Eva Maria Stadler, Beatrice von Bismarck and Isolde Charim, as well as a text and reference material for the exhibition Artists of the No (Projektraum Viktor Bucher).

Introduction

In a society characterised by an imperative to perform, to be productive, to take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance, artists are more than ever pressured to work and conform to the demands of professional activity. This is not the only way. In other, more questionable words, is this the way we really want to work? How do artists manage the imbalance between work and life? Are there creative possibilities in refusal, passivity, procrastination and idleness?

Introduction

Introduction

Press release written on the occasion of the exhibition Back Once Again (Forever) by Michiel Ceulers at Galerie Juliette Jongma.

Introduction

Let’s imagine that this text is written for an exhibition set at the twisted conjunction of an estuary, where a river meets the sea, or at a mangrove swamp, or, for that matter, at a flooded underground Miami car park temporarily inhabited by an octopus. Temporal insofar as a waterpump and a human techno-fix later the space was dried out, and the cephalopod inhabitant, with its proven adaptive qualities, would have found refuge elsewhere. The question remains whether this climatic event, caused by a sudden influx of a mixture between salt water from the sea and fresh water from the nearby swamp, was only incidental in nature. How a certain negligence could have allowed for this makeshift pool to take shape in these cultivated environs, previously solely inhabited by humans and domestic pets. And, beyond most of our figuring capacities, to what extent one might be able to determine the degree of relative sea level change from tasting the thin film of salty soil left to cover the surface of the car park floor after being drained.

The text Becoming Aquatic Eyewitness was commissioned for the exhibition Liquid Properties by Marjolijn Dijkman & Toril Johannessen at OSL contemporary in Oslo, taking place between 23 May and 29 June 2019.

Introduction

→ Bestiary of Corona Animals is now available via Onomatopee.
ISBN: 978-94-93148-31-4

Bestiary of Corona Animals is an essay that illuminates the causal relations between the human tendency to objectify the world, the continuous expansion of extractive activity, the trace effects of the current climate regime, and the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic. These seemingly distinct phenomena, often analyzed and discussed separately, in fact share the same roots. The text introduces a cast of different animals, both fictional and tangibly real, whose personal opinions and experiences—informed by animal rights and ethics, biopower, geopolitics, and necropolitics—give credence to the hypothesis that the human colonization of the natural territory of the virus enabled the pandemic to spread in the first place. These animal voices seek for a type of worlding that provides an equal footing for humans and non-humans, starting by exchanging self-interest for empathic non-understanding and selfless reciprocity: from the isolation of thinking and acting in a vacuum, to a world continuum.

Introduction

The exhibition Can’t Hear My Eyes (NoguerasBlanchard) is accompanied by the catalogue Cahier I – Can’t Hear My Eyes, designed by Quinten Swagerman and Thomas van der Vlis. The catalogue features extensive documentation of the works in the exhibition, a contextual and a visual essay.

The catalogue is published in an edition of 100, and is available for €10. The catalogue can be ordered via this website.

Introduction

The exhibition Two in the Wave is accompanied by Cahier II – CC, a collaborative effort between Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (The Office for Curating) and PrintRoom. The book is designed by Max Senden and published in an edition of 100. CC is a correspondence between Thomas Jenkins and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk revolving around the work The Seas and Oceans of the World (Thomas Jenkins, 2012). 

Introduction

Within the Sound of Your Voice
Parallel Project for the 5th Marrakech Biennale – 2014

Within the Sound of Your Voice is a portable group exhibition at thirty-three rounds per minute. The exhibition is portable, taking the shape of a vinyl record, weighing approximately four hundred and forty grams. The vinyl is protected by a sleeve, which also serves to express and illustrate its contents – textually, visually, aesthetically. The sleeve of this exhibition has been designed to incorporate a third dimension: an architecture that can be unpacked and enveloped in another space, becoming a space in and of itself, or a space within a space. The exhibition is comprised of the voices of thirteen artists in the act of speaking, at times indirectly or metaphorically: Milena Bonilla and Luisa Ungar, Dina Danish and Gogi Dzodzuashvili, Dora García, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Marcellvs L., Lubomyr Melnyk, Clare Noonan, O Grivo, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Joana Saraiva, and Triin Tamm.

The record is released in an edition of 100, and is available for €35. The record can be ordered via this website.

Introduction

The exhibition Suite (Botanique) is accompanied by Cahier IV – Suite (Botanique), a collaborative effort between Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (The Office for Curating) and the Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2014. The seven inch vinyl record is designed by Quinten Swagerman and Thomas van der Vlis. Cahier IV – Suite (Botanique) features excerpts from works by Alexandra Duvekot (The Plant Orchestra, 2013) and Bartholomäus Traubeck (Years, 2011).

The record is released in an edition of 200, and is available for €10. The record can be ordered via this website.

Introduction

Can’t Hear My Eyes shows a number of works with sculptural and painterly connotations, dimensions and properties: to evoke their seemingly static nature and surface in light of the work’s inherent – and consequently invisible and not directly sensible – dynamics, through the format of an exhibition, in two given spaces. It does so in order to test the potential of the work of art in the key of current tendencies within our information culture. The given fact that we have grown more and more accustomed to hard facts as based on transparent, ascertainable (‘checkable’) and ‘democratic’ sources of information and modes of communication; and the surge for clear–cut definitions to indicate the parts that surround us, has lead to, one could argue, an incongruity between works of art and the way we generally organise and conceive of our lives.

The exhibition Can’t Hear My Eyes proposes to assess the viewer’s position – the witness and perceiver of the event: the space, the exhibition, the artworks –  by foregrounding the potentiality of perception and the distribution of the sensible by means of ‘showing, not telling’. In so doing, it avoids didactic and explanatory devices in order to emphasize, and hopefully stimulate modes of perception and awareness for the artworks’ surfaces, tactility, their material qualities and characteristics, and moreover to think the inherent processes of application, the mental and physical application of the possibilities and languages of painting and sculptural elements as allocated to physicalities; the performative and dynamic parts that have become part of the works by preceding actions and that are evoked through the act of making.

Ultimately, the exhibition implies a certain movement – albeit its seeming tranquility and delay – towards an understanding of material as information: it is an invitation to engage in a close reading of surfaces, of speaking through volumes and images rather than ‘know–what’ (facts). In that, as one might sense at this point, the exhibition is not structured around a specific theme, but is rather an analogy of artistic approaches and practices in which the artworks shape the exhibition through internal self–organisation, the process mostly coming from the artworks and the spaces themselves.

Introduction

The 8th edition of POPPOSITIONS will revolve around the term “woke” and how its mainstream popularity and increasing application intersects with corporate and capitalist structures. The idea of being woke and wokeness concerns raising social awareness, taking actions in response to dominant paradigms, acknowledging one’s privileges towards understanding the struggles of others, and giving space to social bodies that have been silenced, unacknowledged and underrepresented. With the forthcoming edition of POPPOSITIONS we want to think collectively about what responses and forms of resistance can be formulated when ideologies have become trendy and woke-washing brands cash in on social justice.

To give an example, feminist slogans such as “The future is female,” “Don’t underestimate the power of a woman,” and “We should all be feminists” have increasingly permeated the public realm through global fashion companies ranging from Topshop, Asos, Monki and Dior, the latter advocating this motto on a €620 T-shirt. Dedicated website sections of these brands propagate wokeness, awareness-raising and self-empowerment, prominently stating to reserve parts of the sales revenue to, for instance, the betterment of labour conditions for women and planned parenthood. Another Monki item states “Choose Peace,” but in judging the label “Made in Bangladesh” we may come to feel that the notion of displaying wokeness through consumption often comes at a double price.

Introduction

I came to New York to study art, and to meet artists. And where do you find artists? In bars, especially in the 1950s. Drinks were cheap in those days. White Rose bar whiskey was twenty-five cents a shot; if you had $3 you could get twelve shots – that would do it. Among the artists’ bars was the old Cedar Tavern on University Place and Eighth Street, not to be confused with the Cedar Bar, which was also on University Place and came later.

The Cedar Tavern had been a workingman’s bar and therefore cheap. It was just a long, narrow space with a room in the back. It was where Pollock had kicked the bathroom door off its hinges and they left it that way. The fluorescent lights looked green. They had Audubon and horse prints on the walls. I can just picture the bartender right now – he had a funny eye, and because of that he looked at you strangely. For dinner you could go to Nedicks around the corner and get a fifteen-cent hot dog. I began hanging out at the Cedar Tavern, where I went with the sole purpose of meeting the grand masters of abstract expressionism.

[…]

John McMahon, another of Bill’s assistants, knew de Kooning well by this point, and he told me a funny story about how he first met him. “One day I was walking down the street,” he said, “and there was de Kooning. I saw him at the Cedar Tavern but I’d never talked to him, so I crossed the street and said, ‘“Mr. de Kooning, I’d like to talk to you about painting.”

“Talk about painting?” de Kooning said irritable, as if I’d brought up a thoroughly unpleasant subject. “I hate goddamned painting. Are you that son of a bitch from Yale that’s been leaving notes under my door?”

“No, no,” I said, “that wasn’t me.”

“Aw, to hell with it then,” he said. “Good-bye!” And he walked away.”

Introduction

The text Couple Goals at The Body Shop was written on the occasion of the exhibition Kiss of life by Janina Frye at P////AKT in Amsterdam.

The text focusses on the following problematic: What is the basic unit of reference for the human in times at which the boundaries between nature and culture, as well as object and subject have seemed to become increasingly porous? When identities are thought of as fluid, and selves are fragmented into different marketable data sets and informational codes, indeed it seems difficult to uphold a holistic and stable image of the human. At the same time, we seem unable to escape or overcome our anthropomorphic tendencies at will, and as much as we are trying to develop and reapply ourselves as post-human, as an enhanced and extended species, we are resubmitted to the body immersed in radically immanent relations.

Introduction

The Curatorial Program for Research (CPR) is an intensive research program for international curators. CPR introduces its participants to new cultural localities, a variety of artistic practices, and differing modalities of artistic production. Developed by practicing curators, the Curatorial Program for Research aims to provide directed professional growth for curators. CPR was established in 2015 with headquarters in Indianapolis and Stockholm, and maintains an expanding network of satellite locations in over fifteen cities worldwide.

As part of the first iteration of the CPR Core Program, a group of ten curators will travel to Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland. The Core Program stresses both academic rigor and on-site  research. Each city  features a customised curriculum that includes readings and classes about local history, arts and culture, as well as visits to local artist studios, and art institutions. During the Program, the participants will present and discuss articles, papers, and essays related to their daily visits.

Introduction

View Trailer for an Exhibition.

The exhibition Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici posits the book – as both thing, container and idea – against the backdrop of some recent and ongoing discussions that address the probable demise of the bound volume in conjunction with the emergence of digital reading devices. As the title of this exhibition already implies, a somewhat speculative approach towards the subject is taken insofar any productive attempt at summation of the debate has resulted in stances taken on either side, but quite obviously avoided closure as the situation undoubtedly remains open–ended.

Departing from the title, that somewhat wittily plays with the redundancy of such effort, the exhibition puts forward a variety of devices and modes of interaction that enable humans to engage with information and knowledge, its sharing and distribution. Indeed, here one could speak of the co–existence of the book with other variable – both digital and analog – formats, rather than reasoning in terms of a dichotomy. As much as this is the case, the key question for this exhibitions remains: to what extent have the changes in our relationship with information and the formats we employ for its transmission altered our rapport to knowledge and its production? What is becoming of bound volumes today – that foundation of our society, those keepers of our history – from both a personal and an artistic perspective? The exhibition Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici ultimately presents an analogy of artistic examples that advances the ways books find their inscription into contemporaneity, and speculates on possible scenarios to come.

Introduction

The text David & Goliath – De Onderzeebootloods (in Dutch) was written as a reflection on the format and impetus of De Onderzeebootloods, the large-scale presentation space of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. The text was published in Metropolis M Issue 3, June–July 2013.

Introduction

As our relationship with technology is ever more intimate and pervasive and its influence deeply entrenched within the human living complex and our working and living practices, it seems increasingly difficult, even impossible to uphold the artificial separation line between nature and technology. The influence of the digital world is no longer confined to our online activities: we use wearable monitoring devices and digital extensions to gather data about our health, condition, and performance. Consequently, the human body is ever more frequently and closely connected to digital media and the associated logic of codes and algorithms that control life in our current society. Laura Kuusk’s exhibition Dear Algorithm, is located at the centre of this field of tension, trying to seek alternative relations and forms of kinship with non-human agents such as mushrooms and other organisms.

The exhibition is part of Tallinn Art Hall’s 2020 thematic focus on feminism in the 21st century, highlighting critical issues confronting women today. Maria Kapajeva, Flo Kasearu, Laura Kuusk, Ede Raadik and Maria Valdma will stage solo exhibitions dealing with complicated narratives that go beyond what is regarded as “women’s issues” such as the politics of care and the body, the impact of technology on everyday life, violence and trauma, labour and poverty, as well as fertility and decay. These topics nonetheless have a very powerful impact on women’s lives. These artists will use the language of contemporary art to infuse a sense of urgency to engage with visual politics that moves between the female body and the spheres of public discourse.

Exhibition guide and booklet via this link.

Introduction

As we find ourselves in the midst of global crises, witnessing the rise of populism, xenophobia, nationalism, misogyny and racism, art needs to be more political than ever. Not as a genre, but as a field that must extend and apply itself without invitation, to trigger responses where none have been called for, and to confront what we take for granted. In response to this situation, the new edition of POPPOSITIONS is looking for proposals that will steer and reinvent the political imagination towards diverse forms of political opposition that are rich in alternatives, concrete in propositions, and delivered through everyday projects, all aimed at an effective and collective strengthening of our daily living and working practices. To quote philosopher Rosi Braidotti: “So don’t agonize, organize, because there is just so much that needs to be done!”

Conceived as an experiment with the art fair format, POPPOSITIONS annually aims to prompt and trigger experimental and innovative approaches to the art market. It takes the shape of a curated exhibition and an ongoing critical dialogue as to collectively emphasize matters of shared concern, rather than business as usual.

In that, POPPOSITIONS strongly believes in a collaborative and responsive approach, by being quick on its feet and working together with those initiatives, artists, curators and collectors that jointly pursue to rise to the occasion and grapple with the complexity of our current social and political climate. It attracts wide support from the art sector and serves as an inspirational format for new alternative art fairs throughout Europe.

Having been established in 2011 as a counterpoint to mainstream art fairs, POPPOSITIONS has previously addressed questions of artistic agency, self-organisation, cynicism and criticality in order to shape its profile within the cultural and economic landscape. With the 2017 leitmotiv Don’t Agonize, Organize! inspired by philosopher Rosi Braidotti, the forthcoming edition of POPPOSITIONS seeks to respond to the political turmoil we are currently experiencing on a geopolitical scale. We believe that art needs to be more political than ever. Not as a genre, but as a field that must extend and apply itself without invitation, to trigger responses where none have been called for, and to confront what we take for granted.

To further amplify and shape its programmatic focus, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (The Office for Curating, NL) has been appointed as the artistic director of this year’s edition. This year’s jury consisted of artist Kasper Bosmans, artist and curator Jo-ey Tang and curator Elise Lammer, with the support of curator Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk. With the leitmotiv as a leading principle, the jury has sought for proposals that steer and reinvent the political imagination by proposing diverse forms of political opposition that are rich in alternatives, concrete in propositions, and delivered through everyday projects. On this premise, the jury has selected 21 project spaces, artist initiatives and galleries that re-envision what it means to be grounded, accountable and active as part of a community with shared hopes and aspirations.

Introduction

The Earthbound takes the shape of a film programme that revolves around the idea of the human being inextricably bound to the Earth, its soil and ecosystems. Differentiating between ‘the world’ as the social construct of a manmade and human society, and ‘the Earth’ as an assembler of living and inert, human and nonhuman, the programme aims to confront the persistent and often feigned disconnection between humankind and the Earth. In that, the programme seeks to reinscribe and reassert the human figure to the soil, as based on a playful etymological reading of the Latin root ‘humus,’ to furthermore seek for its recovery in the shape of a dependent, far from autonomous species that is becoming with and defined alongside the different forms of existence that co-inhabit the Earth.

From fieldwork-taking to patchwork-making, The Earthbound presents a number of film works by artists that underscore the importance and urgency of being responsive to the given matters and concerns at hand, to further engage in the diplomatic affair of establishing interrelations and alliances with and between the arts, politics and the sciences. In other words still, if one would come to think of Holocene ecologies in the wake of the Anthropocene, by what means could the arts position itself in accordance and response to the changing and intensifying climatological and environmental changes that face us today? Here one might think of the arts prompting and rendering oneself sensitive to the geopolitical concerns that – in terms of scale and reach – often take place outside of our daily living and working practices, or to generate awareness for those biological and ecological instances that bypass the human sensorium altogether. More actively speaking, The Earthbound looks at those instances from artistic practice that think through the possibilities of adaptive and livable ecologies; works that engineer new domains of experience and thinking of artificial, hybrid and synthetic constellations beyond business-as-usual, or a human “technofix” for every potentially threatening scenario.

Ultimately, The Earthbound aims to foreground the idea that the human fleshed existence is evenly and equally open to enquiry, furthered through artistic investigations into material states and substances that pass through both bodies of land and the tissues of being human – enabled through media archeology, psychogeography, documentary and speculative aesthetics. In thinking Earth magnitude, from the soil, let us engage in acts of consciousness-raising about our place in the scheme of things, resonate and tremble those ‘backdrops’ that are normally held still, for we are always coming home.

Introduction

Ecologies of Existence
— On Approaching Life from within the Exhibitionary Complex 

Essay and lecture for Fall Semester; lecture series held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

By what means could we scale the exhibition format as to become inclusive towards polyphonic assemblages, bypassing the commonly implied dichotomies and binary dialectics of internal and external, nature and culture, natural and given versus manmade and artificial, human and non-human agency, and to look for lively, diversified stage-setups for an exhibition that would posit an equal footing with other modes of being in the world?

Introduction

The work by Marlena Kudlicka is marked by speeches. Although her sculptures and sculptural collages may be considered taciturn and contemplative on the outset, their agendas are ostensibly more capacious and expressive than their neutral surfaces might imply. Driven by an ongoing interest in redefining the concept of sculpture, Kudlicka seeks to overcome the prevalent connotations of the art form as solidified instances by expanding her practice into the field of sculpture as a form of spatial writing. Writing that emphasizes sculpture as a node of communication that actively negotiates the physical and mental processes of the sculptures’ coming-into-being and their relation to space. For her exhibition Elements of Peaceful Engagement this outward communicative motion is extended further and has become embedded in a discussion revolving around the protocols and strategic systems intrinsically connected to office and workspace standards, and how these, in turn, come to inform and structure human decision-making processes.

In the exhibition Elements of Peaceful Engagement Kudlicka continues her interest in the various parameters of language structures, among protocols, classifications, systems of methods, concepts revolving around norms, standards, and strategies. These sets of rules and instruments explored as coping mechanisms for structuring daily routines offer insight into the concept of a workplace, whilst simultaneously influencing and informing an atmosphere in which physical and mental movements generate an interchange in the decision-making process. Notions like protocol, strategy, norm and standard play a fundamental role in the process of establishing a communication trajectory. However, Kudlicka does not employ her work to establish a new norm or standard for a workspace, but rather takes the subject matter of structuring principles to question how radically they influence the effectiveness of communication processes in a workspace environment.

Introduction

On Thursday the 10th of May I proceeded to talk about the ever so close relationship between life and work, to discuss my devotion to creating my own (curatorial) writing style through a palm reading conducted by a London-based psychic. Rather than becoming the negation of everything the other person would say, I am inclined to think my writing and curatorial work is closely linked to my own personality. Paradoxically as it may sound to then engage in a palm reading, the question rises whether a reading of our, and in this case my physical make-up could prove to be a more structural and tangible approach to the continuous act towards individuation? Since this exercise is rooted in the physical world of encounter, between two persons: myself, the subject of the exercise, and an external agent, or should I say agents?, the informant, the psychic; the hand, the eye, and the mind; between the physical and the mental; the knowable and the sensible, the unknown and the open-ended, I intend this exercise as to open both a speculative space and to take flight from the common denominators of know-how (experience through practice, learning), know-what (facts) and know-why (science).

The exercise is employed to come to terms with the field of not-knowing, or nonknowledge. This area of enquiry seems to be in conflict with the scientific and academical modes of rational thinking, and, more generally, could be considered as reactionary and contested in our time-pressured culture of high performance. In fact, artistic “research” often functions as a parody of instrumentalised academic knowledge production: falling short of even its eroding criteria. However, this may not be a negative thing, at least not entirely. The failure to meet a dubious standard always holds the potential to erupt into a questioning of that standard. In this respect, it is interesting to note the place held by the symptom in what passes for artistic knowledge production. While the rhetoric and practice of artistic knowledge production can themselves be seen as symptomatic of the social constraints to which autonomous art is subjected, the outcome of this exercise actively engages with the ‘symptom’ as an alternative to the empire of signs created by academic disciplines: pointing both backwards and forwards in time, beyond the current order of things.

Reading / Writing: An Exercise in Not–Knowing is partly published in Reading Complex Act V – Postscript.

Introduction

The text Fiction on Display – A Collection of Collections puts forward a number of fragments from fiction novels that describe a provocative account of a collection of objects. In that, the text is intended to open new registers of thought, curatorially, to think about fiction and fictitious collections as a means to inform exhibitions and presentations in different and divergent manners, as exemplified by, for instance, the better known endeavours of Malraux, Broodthaers, Filliou and Duchamp. The text features fragments from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) by Dubravka Ugresic, A Barbarian in Asia (1945) by Henri Michaux, and At the Tolstoy Museum (in: Forty Stories, 1987) by Donald Barthelme.

As a rise to the occasion, the artist collective France Fiction was invited to make a contribution, for which they proposed the inclusion of a recent gameplay with a collection of objects entitled Le jeu de qualités.

Introduction

Followup is the title for a Dutch-German collaboration, for which one Dutch and one German curator will be given the opportunity to dedicate half a year to the development of an exhibition programme in different museums and art spaces in the border region.

The Mondriaan Fund offers and supports this practice-oriented foreign residency for a young Dutch curator up to the age of thirty-five. In that, a collaboration has been established with Schloss Ringenberg in Germany. With the residency, the Fund aims to provide an opportunity for young curators to reflect and expand on their practices in a different environment and culture. The jury for this residency has appointed Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk as the curator-in-residence for the period of July to December 2014.

Introduction

The text A Correspondence Between Ane Mette Hol and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk was written for the occasion of the exhibition For a Length of Time at Motive Gallery, Brussels.

Introduction

Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting, through which events and people return from the limits of time and mortality, differs sharply from the modern concept of a linear, progressive, finite time. The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in our perceivably stable present. On the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events is precisely what troubles the boundaries of past, present, and future. The ghost always presents a problem, not merely because it might provoke disbelief, but because it is only admissible insofar as it can be rationalized by a modern concept of time. One could argue, from the standpoint of modern historical consciousness, supernatural forces can claim no agency in our narratives. During this event we would like to consider the problems that rise with such discourse and scrutinize the ghostly presence and condition from a current perspective.

Introduction

Essay coinciding with the exhibition This Formless Thing by Alexandra Navratil at SMBA, Amsterdam. The text focusses on image distribution and circulation on online platforms, and by what means a digitised collection (of images) could be approached in the light of a private collection and as an artistic device.

Introduction

The Great Indoors is the title of a group exhibition that takes as its central subject the increasing disconnection between nature and human activities, as advanced by a number of artworks, positions and approaches taken from a variety of artistic practices. In that, the exhibition seeks to comment on man’s growing distance, retreat and deviation from nature – especially considering the ways in which we generally conceive and organize our lives today – as well as its recovery, particularly in the light of the natural, domesticated and artificial forms of representation and mediation that have come to be attributed to the overall perception of “nature in general”. In other words still, the increasing social construction of the concept of nature, expressed within a cultivated context, has arguably fostered an elaborate network of what might be termed a surrogate nature, or an Ersatz nature. Moreover, there is a tendency to consider and implement nature as a static resource and a malleable entity. At the same time, however, nature is treated, paradoxically enough, as a self–contained and self–regulating ‘domain’, capable of providing an unsurpassed backdrop for a quiet break… Or has this lengthy break come to an end, nature no longer functioning as a mere backdrop for human activities?

The Great Indoors will engage with the question “If nature is no longer a mere background for human activities, what does this change mean to the arts and social sciences?” As such, the exhibition will put forward a number of transitions: from the idea of nature as a backdrop for human activities to the social conception of the natural – the shift from external to externalized nature – and a further leap from the exterior to the interior: the home and the domesticated, the studio, the gallery space and the artificial: The Great Indoors. In so doing, the ultimate landmark might perhaps consist of the idea that nature is not only a support structure, but an assembler, one that links the living and the inert while being both, that serves as a basis to explicate the social and the material, beyond the realm of the formal, and that leads us back to being animals…

Introduction

The text High Definition revolves around the artistic practice of Dan Walwin, and was commissioned for the catalogue coinciding with the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award 2016: an art prize and exhibition – this year focussing on contemporary art from The Netherlands – conceived and hosted by Kunstmuseum Bonn.

The central axis of the text concerns Walwin’s employment of video installations, further specified in the key of the nonhierarchical relations established inter se the different actors presented in his work, both on the level of the spatial ramifications of the exhibited work and the subject matter presented in the films. These actors – be they human, a car tire, a wire fence or a slab of concrete – surely possess different degrees of intensity, scale and reach, but eventually no arbiter or authoritative figure, granted the rights to acknowledge and legitimize the event, seems to be able to present itself. Exploring such flat ontology, one enters into immersive environments where the material components and object-actors are reminiscent of those counterparts present in our daily living and working practices, whilst remaining strangely ambiguous and radically other from those prior experiences inscribed onto and deducted from our preconceived knowledges and epistemological maps.

Introduction

The exhibition Homestead of Dilution presents the first outcome of a joint and collaborative practice between artist Domenico Mangano and architecture historian Marieke van Rooy. In their work, Mangano & van Rooy seek to explore and give insight into the commonly overshadowed workings of psychiatric institutions that have become subject to the gradual dismantling of the welfare state. By interweaving historical accounts of countercultural experiments in anti-psychiatry from the seventies in The Netherlands with present-day approaches and perspectives from psychiatric treatment and facilities, their work presents both a playful and critical commentary on the myth of the normal, mental illness as a culturally manufactured paradigm, and the prevailing idealization of individualism.

Following an extended period of research and a number of residencies, the exhibition Homestead of Dilution specifically centers around Dennendal, an institution for destitute people suffering from intellectual disabilities, located in Den Dolder in The Netherlands. Lead by Carel Muller between 1969-1974, the Dennendal institute was reformed according to an experimental and liberating set of ideals and approaches, radically opposing the then current inhumane and clinical treatment of patients. Emphasizing the necessity for complete acceptation and equality for the mentally disabled, Muller sought to create small communities in which the patients could develop their respective needs and characteristics. As part of a larger philosophy, mixing theories from psychological-humanism, anarchism and marxism, Dennendal became an emblem for a micro-society prioritizing and celebrating the human aspect and profundity of the mental and the destitute, as opposed to the governing logic of power, prestige, and its adherence to monocultural role models.

Taking this account as their departure point, Mangano & van Rooy have conducted onsite fieldwork, observing and becoming part of the daily living and working practices of the clients currently inhabiting the Dennendal institute. Balancing between document and intervention, their work seeks to appropriate and re-evaluate aspects of dilution as to artistically diversify and enliven the social fabric between artists, clients, staff, and the institutional frameworks in which these different actors are embedded. Through workshops, performances, social encounters and (film) documentation they aim to lay bare the complexity of Dennendal, partially by invoking the institute’s rich history in the light of its current bleek and somber state of affairs. Ultimately, the exhibition Homestead of Dilution could be seen as a commentary on the ambiguous nature of the site, but rather serves as part of a wider investigation into apparent separations between center versus periphery, illness versus sickness, normal versus healthy. How can we steer and reimagine these imposed normative ethics and so called radical forms of otherness? How can we, from an artistic point of view, refactor and enact upon the principle of dilution as to emphasize matters of shared concern?

Introduction

Introduction

The exhibition Honorary Vertebrate Club addresses marine life and ecology in a time of unprecedented environmental change, the rapid depletion of life forms and loss of biodiversity. Focussing primarily on the octopus and other molluscan cephalopods, such as the squid, cuttlefish and the nautilus, the exhibition is centered around modes of survival and adaptation in aquatic climates where environmental backdrops have become increasingly unstable and subject to ecological breakdown, or have ceased to exist altogether. Introducing a number of templates and artistic practices concerned with marine life, the exhibition establishes analogies between human and non-human animals—the octopus often deemed as a radical form of otherness—in an aim to underline persistent anthropocentric tendencies and human exceptionalism. Instead of the human figure we follow the octopus as main protagonist: an inventive environmental engineer and expert tool-user with complex social behaviors, thriving together with the jellyfish in oceanic climates increasingly subject to manmade acidification, rising sea temperatures, and underwater colonialism through deep sea mining. What can we learn from the adaptive qualities of the octopus, its shape-changing capacities and internet of brains? Can we develop “tentacular thinking” as a way of learning to “stay with the trouble,” rather than keeping to engage in acts of business as usual?

Introduction

Text written on the occasion of the exhibition I’m not an island, I’m a body of water at JosédelaFuente Gallery.

Introduction

The online exhibit The Imaginary Museum of Tintin assembles the preliminary visual research on Tintin, Studio Hergé in relation to contemporary artistic practices and artworks on the subject.

View the exhibit here.

Introduction

Introduction

Welcome to the temporal headquarters of the Institute for Cognitive Prosperity and the first showcase of our services in Rotterdam.

The Institute for Cognitive Prosperity is a visionary think tank that seeks to elevate the human mind for advanced mental flourishing and universal cognitive efficiency. It does so by raising awareness of the great benefits of brain alteration; creating enhancing environments and unique transformative experiences. Our vision is one of a blossoming and prosperous world where enlightened citizens at the peak of their cognitive performance are able to unleash their full potential for personal growth and global healing.

We aim for both individual and collective brain advancement and self-optimisation by offering different enhancement services. The core of our activities is centred on heightening mental capacity by developing novel approaches for overcoming limiting brain-body barriers. Similar to how an app needs a smartphone to inhabit, we consider the human body as a vessel that carries the brain and needs constant nourishing. In the centre of our showcase one can find a facsimile rendition of our state-of-the-art research lab, which advocates the possibilities of expanding one’s mental capacity for cognitive growth by uploading different othered minds, exemplified by a formation of brain vases. The vases contribute to our goal to reinvent human cognitive perception that is able to keep up with the accelerating computational ways of interfacing within an ever-changing world. We consider it undesirable to reinstall old mental software; consequently, we propose these vases to think about fundamental metaphors for relating to reality, with additional storage capacity. In addition, brain entrainment sound frequencies will be emitted into the space. These frequencies carry the promise of heightening one’s focus, creativity, and capacity for rational thinking. The observatory room on the first floor presents our upload program. The Upload shows an animated visualisation of MRI-brain-data, accompanied by meditative speech guidance inviting clients to immerse and relax in a unique mindfulness experience. The Upload is based on the widely acclaimed US-American governmental method for brain-self-observation to influence and induce brain and thinking activities. The ceramic tableau at the end of the first floor presents the foundational grounding of the Institute for Cognitive Prosperity, a guiding glyph language mapping an incident in the development of brain changes and manipulation.

We believe that modulating neural activity will be an essential part of future generations, extending their bodies and minds into the realms of machines and digital circuitries. The Institute for Cognitive Prosperity operates as a state-of-the-art research platform now showcasing its first services to provide cognitive peak performance to future customers.

We hope to invent you soon!

Introduction

John Smith, THE POSTHUMAN
Notes for a script, in eleven and probably additional movements

9 April 2014*
In December 2013, John Smith was found by the Norwegian police in the midst of a snow drift, suffering from total amnesia. He was discovered in an industrial area of Oslo and may have been a victim of a crime, police told the Norwegian newspapers. The Oslo police released pictures of the man – who goes by the provisional and generic name of John Smith, until his memory returns – hoping that he will be identified by the public. Despite suffering from amnesia, John Smith proved capable of reasoning fluently in English with an accent, having at least a partial understanding of the Czech, Slovak, Polish and Russian language. Authorities have been trying to determine the man’s identity for at least four months by sending photos and finger prints to East European police forces, among Interpol, and by searching in missing people databases. John Smith has since agreed with the police to seek the public’s help in trying to identify him. In a statement, the police said: “The man has no identity papers, and does not remember his name, where he came from, how he ended up in Norway or any other details of his life. He is aged in his twenties, 187 centimeters tall, has blue eyes and dark blonde hair.”

5 October 2014**
‘John Smith, THE POSTHUMAN’ takes the shape of a group exhibition and a thought-experiment. In departing with John Smith as its protagonist, the project takes an interest in the condition of amnesia, and how this state marks a rupture in one’s daily living and working practices. How to act on the world stage without access to preconceived knowledge obtained through memorisation, without an epistemological map at hand? To what extent does a limited access to memory prompt different affects between a human and its surrounding world? Does amnesia alter the perception of phenomena and the approach towards other objects and entities?

As a thought-experiment, the project inscribes the previous scenario and questions to the idea of “thinking without the head,” as a means to trigger non-cognitive dialogues with our surroundings and to promote new ways of sensuous thinking. In so doing, John Smith becomes both object and subject of interrogation, in which his reaching out and extending into the world comes to represent a way of acting on an equal footing with other objects and entities. Here, the idea of the posthuman is considered as a crucial position in bridging sensibility today, as it no longer privileges human ways of encountering and evaluating the world, but instead attempts to explore how other entities encounter and apprehend the world. In other words still, the posthuman position aims to establish a pluralisation of perspectives – without necessarily rejecting or eradicating the human figure – that complicates our ability to speak univocally and universally about something called the human.

7 November 2014***
As advanced by different sound works and performances, ‘John Smith, THE POSTHUMAN’ seeks to explore different ways of approaching the human figure, by going outside of human common thinking and behaviour, by letting the world, the objects and entities it contains talk back to you. Here one might think of:

I … Dagmar Atladottir’s post-apocalyptic theatre performance of objects, in which post humans revert to pre human representations and activities.
II … An ape’s report to an academy, as put forward by Milena Bonilla.
III … An account of a man texting on a bus, by Patrick Coyle.
IV … The final response of Joan Volmer Burroughs; a phantasmagoria by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Michael Esposito.
V … Breaking the skin and pursuing the temptation of space through the eyes of a spider crab, a performance by Hannah James.
VI … Animal jokes for animals by Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey.
VII … Ieva Miseviciute, Lord of Beef: a series of impersonations ––– dance and speech acts depicting objects, people, phenomena, and philosophical concepts…
VIII … A plant carrying a script by Meggy Rustamova, unfolding the artist’s personal experiences, with blackouts and their consequences.
IX … A monologue of a canary being swallowed by a cat, by Niklas Tafra and Sanna Marander.
X … Luisa Ungar and Milena Bonilla’s conversation with a cacao plant.
XI … The disappearance in a crowd by Alex Waterman.

* Based on an article by Heather Saul, published in The Independent on 9 April 2014.
** Based on a curatorial statement, partially informed by the writings of Levi Bryant.
*** Dear visitor, please feel invited to join us in this thought-experiment and move alongside John Smith in the experiencing of the different sound works and performances.

Introduction

The interview Long Circuits for the Pre-Internet Brain, a Correspondence between Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Katja Novitskova is featured in Estonian Art magazine. The interview revolves around Novitskova’s artistic practice, and pays special attention to the ambiguous deployment of the term “post-internet”, and by what means, if at all, the term can still find its inscription into contemporaneity. The interview can be read here.

Introduction

The exhibition Site Situation B will take place at Kunsthalle Tropical Piz Uter over the mountain peak at 2.905 meter in the Swiss Alps of Engadine, expected to take place on Saturday 26 January at 12:15 pm, depending on the weather conditions.

An act performed orally–based on textual instructions delivered by the artists and un-artists involved, as their piece of art will be read out loud–by the co-pilot through a megaphone while flying over the Kunsthalle Tropical Piz Uter with a small aircraft called STEMME S6-RT.

An installation view photo taken out of the cockpit and being published after the act will be the only approach to and remainder of the exhibition. The textual instructions will be destroyed after the performance. All names of the participants will be published.

Introduction

A Memo to Charlie Parker is an interactive lecture that serves as the introduction for the exhibition Shadows of a Doubt, taking place in October 2013 at the Tallinn Art Hall, as part of the Tallinn Photomonth 2013.

The lecture is intended to foreground the two key positions of the exhibition: to slice through the dichotomy of past, present and future and focus on the conditions of the present moment instead, and secondly, to address the speculative and fictive (constructed, manipulated) nature of images in giving shape to and seizing the present moment, the now.

In that, the lecture takes the shape of eighteen memo’s (attributed to the song Now’s the Time by Charlie Parker) which are linked to the outcome of multiplying the eyes of two dices. Members of the audience are invited to throw the dices and read from or watch the corresponding resource.

Introduction

Dear Visitor,

Firstly, a warm welcome to The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. In fact, it goes without saying that your presence is much appreciated, and is deemed even more necessary for this kind of exhibition endeavour. As you will see.

You may have already guessed that The Museum of Unconditional Surrender departs from the above curious account, although – and please bare with us – we will momentarily hold certain points of view in suspense. The exhibition you are about to witness proposes a slight reversal: a twist of plot. Indeed, the plot thickens, as we speak.

The exhibition will shift its focus from the artworks and how they perform, to those objects and structures that commonly enable and advance their presentation. In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the mise en scène, support structures, and displays take centre stage; temporarily abandoning their secondary rolls in favour of a leading one. What or who is playing the active role now? We can no longer speak of a B-squad, or a stand-in … Everything is centre stage. The division of roles between objects and subjects is made ambiguous and placed in the center of attention.

In this perceptual arms race, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender makes room for renegotiating the position of the ‘exhibition object’, a boundless set of entities common and akin to the exhibition space. A natural habitat of sorts. Projectors, plants, interns, exit signs, plinths, pedestals, wires, strings, temporal walls, invigilators, monitors, and vitrines with attached dust particles: the exhibition space is an ecology full of playful objects and entities. Let’s unsettle the plot and have an encounter with the object that is mostly withheld from sight and withdrawn from thought, but that has an abundance of qualities and characteristics, a material agenda, its own state of being, and enhanced functions to enable us to perceive it and other, external phenomena. 

Thus, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender essentially becomes an embodied experiment – that’s where you come in, dear visitor – aiming to make ambiguous and strange the exhibition’s spatial, physical and written language, the institution to which it has become attached, and more importantly, the objects and entities that it temporarily holds. The visitor essentially becoming an object in its own right; no leading subject who tells what is in front, no heroism of the One. What is it to be an object?

Why ambiguous and strange? Well, as a means to come to terms with the game at play: the idea of a persistent disconnection between object and subject, human and thing, visitor and artwork. To slice through the implied hierarchies, taxonomies, and attitudes in approaching different and external objects, and to stop classifying and seeking to determine what something ‘is about’. Instead, let’s aim to provide an equal footing for those objects and entities we encounter and perceive in an exhibition, so that they are partners in our daily living and working practices. Obscuring the divisions between I and It, What and Who.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a temporal and convivial assembly of differing and cohabiting objects and entities, striving towards a more sensitive and responsive exhibition dynamic.

Yours truly,

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk

On behalf of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Introduction

As fall manifests itself, water and fungi are seeping from the soil, through the crevices of A Tale of a Tub’s concrete basement, into our subterranean exhibition spaces. Perhaps contrary to expectations we are pleased to welcome different microorganisms, bacteria, fungi and the mycelium—the underground filaments of fungi—as our autumnal subjects of study and examination. The exhibition Mycelium as Lingua Franca engages a group of artists sharing an interest in fungi, and, by extension, in the words of anthropologist Anna Tsing, the ways in which mushrooms enable us humans to think about the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins.

As mushrooms have proved to be a resilient form of life in the current man-made climate regime, capable of growing in polluted industrial environments deemed uninhabitable, the exhibition leaps from the human communities of the ‘world wide web’ to the ‘wood wide web’: a complex and vast planetary communication network, consisting of collaborations and exchanges between trees and fungi. These underground hyphal networks, named mycorrhizae—referring to the role of the fungus in the plant’s rhizosphere (its root system)—oftentimes establish mutualistic and symbiotic associations between a fungus and a plant. The plant produces organic molecules such as sugars by photosynthesis and supplies them to the fungus, in turn the fungus supplies the plant with water and mineral nutrients subtracted from the soil.

Let us think of the forest and the mycelium as a field of mind, analogues to the human brain, with similarities in structure, chemistry and synapses, and with equal dependence on basic building blocks such as carbon, nitrogen and water. What do fungi and the mycelium teach us, and how do they question our human minds and our actions? Could we envision to adopt the mycelium as a shared language—a lingua franca—aimed at symbiosis and selfless reciprocity between different modes of existence, away from tired concepts in which progress is based on growth, accumulation, homogeneity through land colonization for monocultural farming, and ‘fossil expressionism’? As soon as we start practicing the art of noticing we may hear the mycelium say: “We are more than one, we are legio, we are in this together…”

Introduction

On the 6th of June, from 21.00 onwards, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender will present its coinciding museum night, with presentations, readings and performances by David Bernstein, Alexis Blake, Yoeri Guépin, Tim Hollander, Hannah James, Wesley Meuris, Museum of Museum, Musique Chienne, among other guests.

During A Night at The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, a range of positions – integral to its exhibition – will be activated and addressed, revolving around the question: by what means of thinking and acting can we overcome the persistent separation between objects and subjects, visitors and the artworks they come to witness in an exhibition? To what degree is this ongoing division of roles informed by classic museological notions of structuring and ordering external objects and realities by means of taxonomies, hierarchies, and classification mechanisms, making objects seemingly dependent on their translation into name tags, descriptive and academic texts? Have we been reasoning badly with objects in the space of an exhibition, over-animating and over-projecting, whilst resting too comfortably in and with our firmly assured categories of being human?

In that, A Night at The Museum of Unconditional Surrender will make an attempt trying to loosen and dissolve the implied distance and hierarchies between the human figure – in the guise of viewer, audience member and visitor – objects and thingly-matter. Through a variety of stage-setups and performative tools, the often delimited roles, granted to and by things and humans in an art context, will be made ambiguous and fluid, from passive subjects to active objects, and vice versa. Positions include: a lecture-performance by Yoeri Guépin, entitled The Thing That Disappeared Into Other Things: a visual journey focusing on the ecology of objects in different guises: the index, the database, the collection, and the exhibition; How to Handle an Object, a performance and series of object-‘handlings’ choreographed by Alexis Blake, diffusing the boundaries between the space of exhibiting and the space of utility, stage and audience; a presentation by Wesley Meuris on FEAK (Foundation for Exhibiting Art & Knowledge), the enterprising loan program that makes art available for everyone; Se non é vero é ben trovato, a performance in which David Bernstein tells a story about an architectural competition for a glamping resort in Malaysia; and the discussion A Parliament of Artists and Things with Tim Hollander and Hannah James, revolving around the quest for a common and shared language between humans and other objects and entities in the space of an exhibition. The night will be accompanied by the ongoing screening of a museological film compilation entitled Collection Cinéma by Museum of Museum, as well as a music act by Musique Chienne – music for dogs and humans.

Introduction

This book is a kind of hypothetical catalogue – more a (self–)provocation and (meta–)reflection than a true editorial object – in which different texts (a critical essay, a manifesto, a conversation and a fictional account) constitute together a multiple approach of an aporia, and is furthermore employed to consider the necessary preconditions and stage setups of the acts of curating and the curatorial in the key of fiction.

None of the Above is published as a device to preclude its own proposed exhibition project The Event of Reality Applied Knowledge / Fiction – whose presentation has been delayed, but as well as to inform a more general understanding of a fictional exhibitionary practice. Thus allowing for speculations and interpretations of the project’s possible shape, outcome, setup, and so forth, also by means of thinking of an understanding of curating as the production of and engagement with knowledge, in which ‘knowing’ is not the absorption of information and materials – not simply analysis and interpretation, but rather something we actively produce through our various practices. In other words, a mental map for an exhibition is akin to laying out a territory of thoughts, a cosmology of connections, attractions, or and again repulsions. Equally to how an exhibition ultimately exists through knowledge, in a mental space, a mental territory is thus to be mapped out.

Introduction

The work by Domas van Wijk is haunted by the ghosts of previous states. Or, in other words, the work is inhabited by different sources, references and material remnants one may be inclined to ascribe to bygone eras. Here it may be misleading to think that van Wijk is driven by sentiment and nostalgia, since his works does not seem to serve as an ode to popular culture and (art) historical examples, but find there inscription in a more open, loose and associative manner. That is to say, in his work one may observe the gradual loss of the objective and the documentary, to its recovery in the key of fiction and storytelling. Upon disclosure, his works manifest as sculptural installations consisting of different interlinking parts. Here it could be said that Domas van Wijk is simultaneously embodying the roles of being an artist and the figure of a trickster, creating layers and webs of different interlinking meanings and connections. He instigates synchronicity and proximity between parallel universes; based on chance he joins different worlds, bringing them together in sculptural assemblages in which animism serves to prioritize the medium as the message and the message as the medium in equal fashion.

The text Objects in mirror are closer than they appear – On the work of Domas van Wijk was commissioned by the Schloss Ringenberg residency programme.

Introduction

Kilometre of Sculpture (KoS) is proud to announce its first outdoor sculpture exhibition in Rakvere, Estonia. Following a yearlong trajectory with an open call for artists, its outcome and with the addition of selected works, the first iteration of KoS is marked by the exhibition On the Estonian Theatre: Twelve Proposals for Rakvere, bringing together works by twelve national and international artists.

The exhibition coincides with the Baltoscandal international performing arts festival in Rakvere, and in judging the tremendous popularity of theatre in Estonia, the exhibition is a rise to the occasion that aims to expand the field of sculpture by seeking for its advancement through artistic practices that explore and activate sculpture in the key of theatre, performance and staging, and vice versa. On the Estonian Theatre: Twelve Proposals for Rakvere brings together works by a new generation of artists that address a certain ‘tension’ within their artistic practices: to strike a balance between the seemingly contradictory mediums of theatre, performance, staging and sculpture. Sculpture, almost per definition, is considered to be a solid and rigid object employed to give lasting form to matter, whereas theatre, performance and the act of staging are essentially fleeting and of a temporal nature. 

This group exhibition puts forward twelve proposals that think through the specificities of sculpture and theatre, performance and staging, taking the shape of hybrid objects and events that respond to the nature of the site in Rakvere, inhabit and become part of the fabric of daily life, whilst questioning these mediums and modes of perception and expression simultaneously. 

The responses of the participating visual artists, choreographers and stage designers vary considerably, and being dispersed around different sites in Rakvere, the consequence is that neither medium is resting comfortably in its respective category. Instead, the works can be thought of as stages and stage setups that allow us to think about these mediums more dynamically and dimensionally; the works being loosely connected and retreated at the same time.

Introduction

As part of the Art Rotterdam art fair, the Open Air section provides a dedicated space for presenting large-scale works of art on the grounds of the Van Nelle Factory. The Open Air section provides an interesting prism through which artistic projects can be thought–both by being inclusive towards different scales, and by allowing relations between the natural environment and the modernist backdrop of the Van Nelle to be forged. The Open Air section provides stage-setups for projects of varying nature, from works that are situated and autonomous, to works that are context-responsive and performative.

Introduction

Listen. I am listening to the Earth.

Percussive Hunter is a group exhibition dedicated to the examination of processes of mattering and sonic resonance contained by, and inherent to material substances. Especially considering the depth of the material contingencies between the inorganic and organic, the human and nonhuman registers of the Earth that have recently gained urgency in artistic practice, among other fields of enquiry. Here, the artistic process of perception-making through mattering is employed to move away from the surface of our contemporary society, through different material strata, sonic and spatiotemporal reverberations, to foreground specific instances of material agency beyond the immediately perceptible. The exhibition title is derived from a certain type of animal that sources its nutrition by means of scanning and tapping surfaces – here one could think of the Woodpecker and the Aye Aye. Thus, although employed metaphorically, the exhibition entails to reach out and seek for those undercurrents, both material and immaterial, audible and inaudible, scopic and non-scopic, that allow artists to reinvent fundamental metaphors and models for relating to our present day reality, beyond surface effects and towards a more deep understanding of how matter functions and resonates within the different natures of the material world.

Ultimately, the exhibition Percussive Hunter could best be framed as an ecology, or as an exhibition that puts forward a climate of vibrant matter and lively intensities, one in which acts of artistic differentiation investigate the varying natures of the material world. In that, the exhibition is tacitly posited against the backdrop of capitalism’s imperative of linear growth and materialistic accumulation, radically standing at odds with ecology’s notion of interdependence and scarcity. In that, the exhibition seeks to introduce and exemplify a number of objects, concepts and phenomena by means of different clusters, pivoting between those fields of enquiry including Dark Ecology and the Anthropocene, Objected Oriented Ontology and Posthumanism. Fields of study and interrogation that inform a fundamental discussion of how matter functions beyond mere ownership and human application, aiming towards a heightened sensitivity towards other, non-human states of material being and the affects they put forward. In so doing, the ultimate landmark might perhaps consist of the idea that an ecology is not only a support structure, but an assembler, one that links the living and the inert while being both, that serves as a basis to explicate the social and the material, beyond the realm of the formal, and that leads us humans back to being animals…

Introduction

A Plea for Tenderness was written for the occasion of the lecture series to coincide with the exhibition Een Poging tot Nieuwe Vriendelijkheid.

Introduction

The text Posthuman Exhibitionism was written as a reflection on a number of tendencies – among New Materialism and Speculative Realism – regarding the idea of approaching other, non-human objects and entities on an equal footing (as opposed to hierarchically), specifically within the context of the exhibition, and thus considering “exhibition objects” ontologically rather than epistemologically. The text was published in Uus Materjal.

Introduction

Found near the intersection of literary fiction and visual art, this exhibition is made for idealists. An exhibition for those wholeheartedly believing in the mind dependency of matter. In times where alternative facts and post-truths are dripping from the ceiling, you—an idealist—may increasingly recognize a desire to willfully retreat into a richly decorated, ornate interior space inhabited by hybrid figures. To accordingly reshape this overstimulating external world fraught with informational glut into private and otherworldly experiences, thoughts and recollections. Being continuously haunted by your Odradek, you decide to dive into and explore a mental expanse inhabited by characters found on the distorted conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

Following in Jarry’s pataphysical footsteps, this exhibition is sought to maximize a poetic resourcefulness by assembling different works that rely on their continuation and complementation, sometimes even their completion through the active mental expansions and additions made on behalf of the idealist, the daydreamer, the visitor, and so on, and so forth. Here we may employ a language that corresponds to a real object, its givenness in the exhibition space, but that relation is purely fortuitous. Instead, Psychosculptural Aesthetics can only wish to emphasize the secretive, often tactic movement of things, the private languages we attach to them in our psycho-sculptural continuation of thought, elsewhere, lodged in the central neural vat until the thing’s contours start to erode, its image slowly morphing into, again, something different, or disappearing entirely by forgetfulness and the slippages of memory. You can only think of something if you think of something else.

As a site of sculptural production, the exhibition Psychosculptural Aesthetics is concerned with the extra work, the mental additions we put in place to shape a world that isn’t necessarily there, but is felt and mighty real nonetheless. From a gradual loss of the documentary and the givenness of things, to their joyous recovery in the key of fictional, ideal and poetic objects-turned-subjects. Something wholly speculative, open-ended and substantively immaterial, like a mental receipt, a department of abandoned futures, a telepathic sculpture, a peculiar sculpture made by carving clouds, a text so close to heart it becomes embodied, consuming an aspirine as a sculptural maneuver, a book of rumors, a psychosculpture.

Introduction

In the context of Qui. Enter Atlas, the fifth and annual symposium of emerging curators at GAMeC, Bergamo, a group of curators will present and discuss their personal experiences, theoretical and methodological positions, and reflect on the profession of the curator. The event is organised by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi, and conducted by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis.

For this occasion, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk will present a paper entitled According to an Office Desk II – The Call of the Bowerbird as a Curatorial and Representational Device (located in the above index).

Introduction

Paolo Brambilla’s multidisciplinary artistic practice utilizes speculative processes and formal permutations, adopting or distorting different productive and reproductive formats, in order to address the infinite cycles of assimilation, dispersion and transformation of the cultural product. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Museo Ettore Fico, Paolo Brambilla takes into consideration the stylistic category of “capriccio” – a thematic processing rich in transformations and free associations of moments seemingly untied to one another – in order to investigate how historically stratified images and information could be dispersed, aesthetically adapted and reapplied so that they can constitute new archipelagos and constellations of meanings. The exhibition Capriccio presents a total environment made of numerous types of objects ranging from modular furniture to amorphous sculptures and decorative structures, analyzing the conceptual integration between the time and space of fiction and the methods of aesthetic and artistic production.

Introduction

Reading Complex Act I & II – Coordinates / Relocations wishes to engage more directly and discursively with an audience on the subject of writing. Essentially concerned with the act of writing within an image-based society, we would like to question how we as viewers, readers and witnesses dissect alternative information and knowledge from a given situation, a presentation, a written account. What is the role of the writer and what motivates their responsibility to the act of writing?

Reading Complex Act I & II – Coordinates / Relocations invites a number of speakers whose practice shows a keen engagement with writing, and how the act of writing might perform a different, more ambiguous role in the field of contemporary art practice. Here, language and writing forms the host for projects that engage with the relationship between art and fiction, art and reality. This could be further considered as a conflict with and a movement from the loss of the documentary image to its recovery in the element of the fictional.

Through open discussion, we wish to engage with the ways in which meaning sets itself in thought, the way it plasticises itself as a body of knowledge not simply by analysis and interpretation, but rather as something we actively produce through our various practices.

Introduction

“I like to see the making of my stories, in essence, as investigations about stories where the product is like a forensics analysis: areas get fenced out to be examined, and evidence is removed from where conclusions can be drawn, but it leaves the connecting of the dots entirely to the viewer – who becomes the de facto investigator.”
– Pablo Pijnappel, Berlin, 2011

Reading Complex Act III – The Plausible dissects the well-known platitude “seeing is believing”. This act takes the shape of a solo presentation in which the work Fontenay-aux-Roses by Pablo Pijnappel forms the central point of the exhibition. Fontenay-aux-Roses, a cinematic work comprised of projected black and white slides accompanied by audio narration, will further complicate the ways by which we consume, i.e. believe, the truths of an image and the stories that exist within them.

Introduction

In the wake of the digital turn, in this era of iPads and Kindles, the book is becoming a sensual luxury artifact, a precious and extravagant superfluity and an aesthetic emblem, subject to new levels of fetishization and bibliomaniacal fancy. With the recent advent of digital reading devices capable of reducing the physical space needed to house thousands of books to the size of a single copy, we are made aware of the possibility that no more bound narratives will cross our domestic thresholds.

Reading Complex Act IV − Sans Titre is an exhibition of artworks, objects and structures that address the physical form of the book in light of its current digital turn and changing modes of readership. Advanced by current art practices and through the re-contextualization of historical works from the Government Art Collection, this exhibition engages with the changing role and function of the library, the thoroughly materialistic quality of the book, the act of annotation, the book’s transition from analogue to digital formats and the consequent shifts in the distribution of texts and the conditions of (co)producing knowledge.

Reading Complex Library
For this phase of the project we, in shifting from an ongoing dialogue, compiled a selection of our growing body of resources into the Reading Complex Library: bringing together objects of reflection and interaction for an audience. The Reading Complex Library contains the books placed in relation to the fragments explored through the Reading Complex programme. This body of knowledge offers a space for dialogue, between ideas and words, things and art-objects.

Introduction

The Reading Complex project was initiated in August 2011, departing from a research phase that included a thorough and immersive exchange of literature, fiction and theory on the current state of reading and writing within the framework of contemporary art practice. Underpinned by a shared interest in (the future of) the book, its materialistic properties and the relationship between image and text in (co)producing knowledge, the project unfolded and was implemented as a number of acts which provided the framework for Reading Complex.

In shifting from a more private and ongoing dialogue, the public phase consisted of five acts: an event in two parts, a solo presentation, a group exhibition and a publication. In that, the initial programmatic structure of the project has been influenced and altered by the character of each partnering institute. Ranging from a non-profit space, a commercial gallery, a governmental cultural institute, and the space of the book, Reading Complex has undergone different modes of engagement.

This book takes up the challenge of gathering this multiplicity within a single bundled work on paper in order to give an overview of what the project has accomplished, as well as to highlight themes addressed which merit continued dialogue and attention. The first part of the book includes essays by the initiators, extending and elaborating on topics explored in the previous iterations. The second part compiles Acts I – IV, including, retrospectively, documentation on the various parts as well as new contributions in addendum. We hope that this resource may offer you an insight into Reading Complex, that it may be an object of reflection and interaction: to both look back at what has been taking place and to allow for new thoughts and new projects to take flight.

Introduction

Reading Complex is a curatorial research project initiated by curators Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Catherine Y. Serrano, supported by the MA Course Curating the Contemporary at the London Metropolitan University, delivered in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery.

Reading Complex forms both the overarching title and leitmotiv for a research platform and a programme of exhibition projects which investigate the notion of reading. Through the introduction of a variety of conditions and configurations, the project intends to consider, show and engage with the ever-changing, but palpable nexus between viewer-reader and image-text. Subject to continuous flux and transformation, this area of enquiry requires our constant evaluation and involvement. Reading Complex therefore acts as a conduit for modes of dialogue and exchange where experience and reflection can come together: focusing on the way we construct narratives and our consistent attempt to make a whole out of sometimes dislocated and unhinged fragments. The project thus challenges the idea that we as readers come prepared to make a narrative reading of any encounter. Strongly informed by ‘inconsistent’ narratives presented to us on a daily basis, we have developed specific expectations and anticipations that are redolent of narrative form. As a result, we have become more alert to fakery, montage, editing, scenario and staging: allocating the reader as the figure who authenticates the narrative by presenting him or herself as both narrator and eyewitness.

Through a shared and collective practice, we hope that Reading Complex enables us to constitute a ‘container of knowledge’, a ground of accumulation, as being something we actively produce through our various practices. As the boundaries between reality and fiction become increasingly difficult to discern, we feel the need to explore how these might come together beyond context and illustration. Seemingly simple, but disturbingly difficult to grasp,‘reading’ forms the leitmotiv for a project that seeks to critically explore these points of fragmentation while focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes.

Introduction

Refugium takes the shape of an image contribution for the Vrijplaats section of the Dutch contemporary art review magazine Tubelight. Coinciding with an interview between the commissioned artist Isabelle Andriessen and curator Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Refugium revolves around issues concerning naturecultures, the exchange of properties between organic and inorganic registers, as well as ideas of liveable ecologies in capitalist ruins and the oppositions between mortality and timelessness as observed through the figure of the mushroom. Refugium was published in Tubelight #97, December 2015 – February 2016.

Introduction

Schloss Ringenberg, with its impressive walls and moat, its apple orchard and black swans, is the highlight for the local inhabitants in the otherwise placid and somewhat dormant surroundings of the countryside. Over the years, the function of the castle has shifted from a noble’s residence to a city-owned semipublic space, with occasional openings to the public. The Derik-Baegert-Gesellschaft is responsible for the conception of the activities taking place at the castle, currently framed by the followup residency programme. On a day to day basis, the activities of the castle’s residents are focused on and dedicated to advancing their respective practices. As a response to this situation, The Ringenberg Biennale seeks to comment on the nature of the site and to establish a sense of mutual reciprocity, inclusiveness and interconnectedness among the people living in Ringenberg and the castle’s residents. To foreground a seemingly enclosed castle, and to make it act as both support structure and gathering place: to activate the site as a temporal shared endeavour.

The castle’s exhibition spaces will host the six solo presentations by the resident artists Emanuel Engelen, Kristina Köpp, Sebastian Ludwig, Jörg Obergfell, Dieke Venema, and Julia Weißenberg, showing both pre-existing and recent works, executed during their stay at Schloss Ringenberg. Each solo presentation aims to give a specific insight into the artist’s practice, further emphasised by interviews conducted in dialogue with the curators. Furthermore, over the past two months we have collected apples from the orchard, located at the back of the castle, in order to produce an apple juice for the occasion of the exhibition. The availability of this natural resource has given us the opportunity to establish collaborations with the Heimatverein (the caretakers of the orchard) and a juice manufacturer in Hamminkeln.

By implementing The Ringenberg Biennale and its corresponding structure, we hope to facilitate dialogues among the local inhabitants, the residents at Schloss Ringenberg and its visitors from Germany and abroad.

Introduction

The group exhibition Shadows of a Doubt invites the visitor to make an appointment with thought: an informal and casual appointment with an exhibition that revolves around our constant, but equally ambiguous relation to, and understanding of the present moment. In other words still, the exhibition is an attempt at capturing a reflection – or a shadow, for that matter – of the present moment as something that is constantly becoming, but never quite arriving, something we grapple with, but hardly – perhaps even impossibly – seem to grasp, something that occasionally keeps you from sleeping at night, but hardly matters the next morning, or perhaps even more. Thus, the exhibition is not so much of an attempt at the summation of the timely values we have come to know, or an act of support by providing a number of definitions, rather it is intended to exemplify and animate the fleeting, unstable and doubtful nature of the present moment. In so doing, the exhibition becomes an assembly point intended to slice through the mutual exclusiveness proposed by the common division of past, present and future. For instance, to address the often fictionalised dimensions of past memories and future anticipations, affecting and sometimes even corrupting the ways by which we are enabled to think in the present tense. In light of the previous remarks, the exhibition proposes to treat the present moment as the ‘untimely’: a continuous and empty time that potentially solidifies new thoughts and recollections by means of our interactions and encounters with objects, ideas, other people and spaces, and situations that give shape to a present condition.

The exhibition and its concerns are advanced by a number of examples and positions – in the shape of artworks and approaches from artistic practices, across different media – each introducing and reflecting on a specific shape and condition, rendition and evocation of the present moment. Hence the works are sought – collectively – to problematise a single notion of the present moment: to posit fragmentations and speculations that could start to serve as encounters, and moreover as objects of reflection and interaction for the viewer. Ultimately, it is the aim of the exhibition to generate momentum, a dedicated time for engagement with certain ideas and concepts that put forward the present moment – through storytelling, narrative sequences, displaced and collected imagery, and so forth. In that, the viewer plays a crucial role – as the witness of the event – in the activation of the works, and above all, in positioning his or her individual and heterogenous perception and (re)collection of the here–and–now, through imagination and aesthetic experience.

It is about making the present moment more ambiguously fascinating than ever before.

Introduction

Forming part of a larger, long-term research into the possibilities of a new life elixir, Geelen employs the exhibition Sliding under Traces to make the first subjective and associative links between an apparent paradox in which the promise of rejuvenation and immortality, self-preservation and mortality is combined. Fascinated by ancient myths around rejuvenation and immortality, Paul Geelen has spent the last months developing a presentation that focuses mainly on the first ingredient: the present-day cosmetic phenomenon of rejuvenation products (age-killers) in the form of snail slime.

Within his artistic practice Geelen focuses on the large, often elusive facets of life, including time and human existence. He is driven by a boundless curiosity about contrasts and paradoxes, contained by seeming oppositions in life and death, natural and artificial, introverted and monumental. His work is perhaps best seen as fundamental and applied research into the grey areas and gaps between and within these abstract concepts. In a subtle and poetic way, Geelen’s work offers the viewer an open view on the working processes that are hidden behind notions of rejuvenation and immortality. In doing so, his work is ofen characterised by a spontaneous and process-oriented working method, in which he observes and tries to adopt scientific knowledge, processes and experiments. Conducting fieldwork and meeting with experts from different disciplines forms a substantial part of his working process. For that reason Geelen traveled to Chile—where the origin of snail slime’s cosmetic qualities were discovered, for its ability to rejuvenate the skin and restore scar tissue—in order to learn about the production process and how he could extract the snail slime himself.

From conducted fieldwork to a new patchwork of meanings, a number of interventions are presented at A Tale of A Tub, in the exhibition Sliding under Traces. These include, amongst others, an extraction of the snail slime, also known as Helix Aspersa Muller—a chemically and complex mixture of proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans, glycoprotein enzymes, hyaluronic acid, copper peptides, antimicrobial peptides, and trace elements including copper, zinc and iron—as well as a sculptural presentation of a snail habitat and a sound recording. Striking here is the relationship between Geelen’s scientific interest and the resilience and durability of the materials he uses. By employing organic and volatile materials such as snails and the liquid they produce, Geelen highlights the unstable and volatile results of his experiment in a sculptural installation that is constantly becoming, but never quite arriving. As the title of the exhibition implies, the artist’s relationship to matter remains unstable. Whilst realising the work, Geelen has to continuously relate to the characteristics, qualities and performance of the entities he deals with. This uncertain relationship and interaction offers a desirable post-human dimension within the exhibition: an important departure point to bridge the gap between susceptibility to emotions, affects and relationships, since it no longer give preference to human ways of encountering and assessing the world, but instead seeks to investigate how others see and interpret the world—take, for instance, the environment of the snail. In other words, pursuing a plurality of perspectives—without dismissing the notion of the human—that makes it difficult to speak truthfully and universally about something that is considered human.

Ultimately, the exhibition Sliding under Traces shows the result of an intensive working process that balances itself between science, alchemy and artistic practice. By applying scientific chemical processes within an artistic context, the exhibition seeks to generate new values and meanings, particularly questioning the associations between organic matter and the mystical, seemingly ambiguous concept of a life elixir, or rather the repetitive manufactured promise by the cosmetic industry. Building on the rejuvenating properties of snail slime, for the next step Geelen will focus on a bacterium that was recently discovered on the slowly decaying, oldest preserved mummies in the world. More specifically, he will focus on the preservative substance Sphagnum (peat moss), an extract from Hoogveen, a protected region in the Netherlands, which has led to preservation of bog bodies. Whilst operating in a precarious atmosphere and under climate change, Paul Geelen’s research focuses on the fusion of various raw materials originating in animals (snails) and plants (peat moss). One element moisturises, whilst the other preserves—rejuvenation (progressive) and preservation (conservative) comprise the basic principles that form an ambivalent mixture…

Introduction

The question is whether this binary interaction between the human body and digital technology effectively results in more insightful and qualitative self-knowledge and identity-formation. Digital extensions and prostheses for the human body often offer solutions for measurable facets of day-to-day existence, but what areas lie beyond the borders of the quantifiable and codifiable? Spending Quality Time with My Quantified Self is a group exhibition presenting a number of artistic positions in which the human condition, bodily development and the physical body to which we are inescapably bound are explored in relation to the technological and economic systems of which they are part. The participating artists suggest forms of wellbeing, identity construction and self-realisation that escape the persistent imperative of constant performance under time pressure, in search of areas that transcend the performance index.

Introduction

Sprawl (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
– Five Reflections on the Work of Hanne Van Dyck

In the spirit of Hanne Van Dyck’s poetic new series of work revolving around the human relationship to nature—devised during an artistic residency in Sierre, Switzerland—I thought I, too, would offer a series of five loosely connected reflections with respect to Van Dyck’s recent findings and undertakings—as opposed to a single, linear argument. Some of these reflections pertain directly to Van Dyck’s works, but there are also some reflections that take a rather more roundabout approach to the matter at hand. Each of my reflections, however, manifest in their own way as attempts to think through and think with the questions that her work poses: What is the relationship between the human figure and its surrounding environment? Between nature and culture? Can we continue to uphold these great divides in times of ecological mutations? Can we think matter without thinking meaning and human intentionality?

Introduction

→ The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar is now available via Onomatopee.
ISBN: 978-94-91677-74-8

Book launches and presentations
08/04/2018 Onomatopee, Eindhoven, NL
21/04/2018 Poppositions, Brussels, BE
7/5/2018 Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, NL

The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar is a partial compendium of the different modes of being that inhabit exhibitions. These different modes of being, often placed outside the realm of art objects proper, are described and activated here as crucial players in the world of contemporary art.

Maximizing a poetic resourcefulness, this book proposes the exhibition as an ecology full of things that are infinitely more dimensional than their ascribed functionality would lead us to believe, and creates a space where species meet, where ontological and epistemological registers clash, overlap, and contaminate each other, where the living and inert, organic and inorganic exchange properties, qualities, and performances.

Ultimately this book aims to show that what revolves around, within, and beyond any given system, resolves to be just as serious and important as what that system aims to convey.

Introduction

View Trailer.

‘O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, ‘I wish you could talk!’ ‘We can talk,’ said the Tiger-lily: ‘when there’s anybody worth talking to.’ […] ‘And can all the flowers talk?’ ‘As well as you can,’ said the Tiger-lily. ‘And a great deal louder.’ ‘It isn’t manners for us to begin, you know,’ said the Rose, ‘and I really was wondering when you’d speak!’ […] – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The exhibition Suite (Botanique) looks into the subject of plant communication, as to propose new ways for humans of thinking with plants by means of affective, non-cognitive dialogues. A type of “thinking without the head” that prompts tacit sensitivity and sensuous modes of exchange. In that, the exhibition aims to overcome the common idea that plants are barely animate objects, and should instead be regarded as partners in our daily living and working practices. Suite (Botanique) includes a number of sound installations: The Plant Orchestra consists of a performance and a lecture by Alexandra Duvekot, in which she addresses the sounds uttered by plants that are inaudible by the human ear, and talks about how sound could function in the treatment of sick plants. The work Years by Bartholomäus Traubeck is an installation based on a generative process that translates data retrieved from the year rings of trees into piano music. Furthermore, a Suite space will host a number of resources, among various vinyl records on the subject of plant communication, including The Forest Organ by Søren Lyngsø Knudsen and Birgitte Kristensen, alongside a radio broadcast on plant consciousness by Carlo Patrão. Ultimately, these artistic positions and experiments might as well be considered as intermediaries between plants and humans, as attempts at bridging certain persistent incomprehensions and miscommunications in the key of developing a shared language.

Vinyl Record  

To coincide with the exhibition, a catalogue in the shape of a seven inch vinyl record (translucent green) is made available. The record contains excerpts from works by Alexandra Duvekot and Bartholomäus Traubeck, and is designed by Quinten Swagerman and Thomas van der Vlis.

The record is released in an edition of 200, and is available for €10. The record can be ordered via this website.

Introduction

Swedenborg Epic. is an exhibitionary reprise offering a domestic space to artists to create a work around three accounts upholding the charge of insanity brought against Emanuel Swedenborg (Stockholm 1688 – Wapping, London 1772). These accounts, largely based on linger and hearsay, have been propagated by Swedish pastor Mathesius, Methodist leader Wesley, and questionably by the Moravian Brockmer as based on events taking place during Swedenborg’s stay at Brockmer’s house in London during 1744.

Arguably, the possible fictionalisation and extravagance of these accounts have lead to a certain degree of degeneration in regard of Swedenborg’s reputation, both during his late days and posthumously. Taking these peculiar and rather ambiguous accounts as its leitmotiv, the project opens a space for speculation and image-correction of Swedenborg’s stature and meaning in the present.

Introduction

The artists presented in Textures of Time share a common interest in making temporalities tangible. Taking temporality as its point of departure, the artworks become agents in order to scrutinise or make palpable time’s various forms and modes of operation. The relation of art to temporality is often linked to the promise of eternity, and maintains a paradoxical relationship between the permanent object versus that of the experiential moment. Departing from this promise, the artworks here emphasise impermanence or allude to the instability of the present. As Boris Groys mentions in his essay Comrades of Time: “Contemporary art deserves its name if it manifests its own contemporaneity – and not simply if it is currently made or displayed.” One would not question how contemporary our contemporaneity is, if the picture of the world were stable and well defined. Instability and uncertainty are characteristic of our time – the present ceases to be a point of transition from past to the future. Instead, present time is a site of continuous reflection and recurring iterations.

Introduction

The Practice of assembles multiple first-person experiences taken from the Dutch art field. Based on true stories, these experiences expose various dilemmas and dogmas that exist in the production and presentation of art. Shaped around a collective first person ‘I’, this publication aims to offer insight in the interests at play in the predominantly hierarchical closed-circuit of the Dutch art field, and extends an invitation to third parties to become involved. Through the figure of ‘I’, the question is raised of whether artists and art institutions have presumptuously assumed their position, and explores opportunities to vacate these positions in favour of new attitudes and models. The Practice of voices its stake in matters of fair pay and remuneration structures, exclusion and inclusion, homogeneity and heterogeneity, authorship and individuality versus the possibilities of democratized and collective practices.

Introduction

Taking place within the frame of the exhibition Spending Quality Time With My Quantified Self, the event Therapy Session will transform TENT into a space for mental gymnastics and artistic experimentation. By making an appointment with thought, Therapy Session seeks to further explore and address the often ambiguous exchange and interaction between the human body and the digital technologies that both underpin and inform our identities. By means of a series of diverse formats, ranging from a lecture on algorithms in artistic practice to a video screening on boxing and the human nervous system, from a performance on self-encryption to a water singing bowl concert, Therapy Session aims to think of and engineer domains of wellbeing beyond the performance-index dominated by obsessive self-monitoring and the aestheticisation of health.

Introduction

“An airport is no more than a sort of shopping mall, a simulated urban neighborhood. Give or take a few things, it offers the same benefits as a hotel.” – Georges Perec

The exhibition Together/Alone takes as its point of departure the notion of non–place as set out in the book Non-Places – An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995) by Marc Augé. The concept of non-place could be considered in the light of how we live in our current society, generally conceived as a society of work, leisure, “freedom”, and travel. In our global society, the non-place is one of the places we relate to. Through the relations individuals establish within the spaces that enable them to move from point A to point B, the non-place takes shape. Airport lounges, hotel lobbyʼs, and subway stations could be considered as examples of the non-place; they mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, through words, sometimes even texts. Non-places are generally conceived as places with a neutral configuration; more often they tend to mimic each other in order to encompass a sense of universality, as opposed to emphasize their, arguably, non-existing individual style or distinctive features. In other words, one feels as much at home in a hotel in Asia as in a hotel from the same chain in London, as well as in a Starbucks in Moscow or in Amsterdam.

The various workings of overarching language structures and the consequent subjectification of individuals informs many of the works on view. Together/Alone brings together a selection of contemporary artworks that intend to make visible, engage, confront, and problematise the numerous oppositions between language as a general force of power (as one of the structures that intend to regulate our daily lives) within the notion of non-place. Although the notion of non-place is not a new one, the intention is not so much to find out how we have reached this point, but perhaps recognise that we have reached it, that we are here.

Introduction

Tolerable Risk features a correspondence between artist Ben Woodeson and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk. The text was published in Art Licks Issue 6, 2012.

Introduction

In Trade Winds in the Age of Underwater Currents, A Tale of A Tub presents three solo exhibitions of artists who, in different ways, research the phenomena of deep sea mining, coastal ecology and underwater cable networks. The artists involved connect different voices and perspectives together to generate awareness on how extraction through deep-sea mining and the construction of cable infrastructures depletes and pollutes the soils of seas and oceans, and contributes to loss of biodiversity in underwater and coastal ecosystems. In her artistic practice, Kristina Õllek (EE) investigates the changing ecological composition of the Dutch coastline and sheds a critical light on the excavation of minerals such as cobalt, nickel, silver and manganese from the seabed, to employ them for the production of renewable energy technologies in the so-called blue economy. Sami Hammana (NL) draws parallels between the Dutch colonial past and current financial practices that are spreading globally through undersea cable networks. The hypothesis of his research project is simple: there is no functional difference between the colonial practices of the Dutch East India Company fleet and the contemporary speculative market economy that is propagated across the globe via submarine cables. In an ongoing investigation into the increasing interdependence of technological and geological landscapes, material and virtual realities, and natural and artificial worlds, Elisa Strinna (IT) presents her recent work on transatlantic cable networks that support a global system of information transmission.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of the Municipality of Rotterdam, the Mondriaan Fund, and M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Stichting. The public program is realized in collaboration with The Embassy of the North Sea. Kristina Õllek’s presentation has been made possible with support from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, the Estonian Embassy in The Hague, and Plado Art Service.

Introduction

Regardless of who turns pro and pursues a career in the arts, or drops the bar and decides to play one’s cards elsewhere, the graduate course will continue on the same level by consolidating new players on the field. No institution without transformation? Tradition doesn’t graduate.

Introduction

The exhibition Two in the Wave presents two works concerned with the artistic treatment of printed-matter and the book in light of our surrounding seas, oceans and the connotations these seemingly boundless expanses put forward. As advanced by the two works, there is a sensible retreat from the documentary image to its recovery in the element of the fictional. For instance, both works share a formal approach towards their display – evoking the characteristics of displaying scientific material – whereas their contents disclose a certain ambiguity towards the treatment of information. In that, the works foreground the possibility of generating alternative knowledge through the displacement and fictionalisation of collected imagery, as well as by showing the construction of systems of representation and the various readings and stories this puts forward.

Introduction

The text The Unbearable Limit of the Exhibition Space makes an inquiry into and aims to give an overview of the exhibition programmes and directorship of Lorenzo Benedetti at De Vleeshal and De Kabinetten van de Vleeshal (Middelburg, The Netherlands), where he served as its curator and director between 2008 and 2014. The text is published in Metropolis M Issue 4, August-September 2014.

Introduction

The publication Untitled (Constants Are Changing) takes the shape of a thesis text, presenting a critical analysis of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, particularly dedicated to the body metaphor and the painterly aspects present in his work. In addition the book includes a number of images of works by Filip Gilissen, with a coinciding text by Lorenzo Fusi.

Introduction

We would like to invite you to become part of The Practice of Brenda Tempelaar.

You could define an exhibition as a cultural field of inter-human energy exchange, mediated on the basis of public interaction with artistic objects (works of art) and processes. In recent years, this field has increasingly adopted the market’s way of thinking: the show must go on—even when art spaces are less accessible at the time of a pandemic. While in art people used to express themselves more often critically or condescendingly about market mechanisms, economic success under the influence of years of political flattening has become the only language in which the importance of works in an art space can be expressed.

In UX, User Experience, U and X, interests that play a role in the existence of art in addition to generating income are reconsidered. Before the start of the exhibition, a field is set out in which the relationships between individuals (users), digital, cultural and public operating systems can manifest themselves on the basis of different interests. The field has the character of a coworking space with a number of variable ornaments that transform the space into a place that invites team performance, exchange of information and community spirit. It invites to observe and assume the role of User Experience designer. UX designers doubt whether their practice still serves optimal user experiences, or whether it is increasingly guided by capitalist intentions and the coherent limitation of the scope of the concept of user experience applied exclusively for marketing purposes. By comparing the conflicting interests of a UX designer with artistic practice, the exhibition aims to reveal a field of tension that has become increasingly pertinent in the artistic field: does an exhibition serve the interests of the artist, the institution or the public? And where do these interests meet?

This basis serves to collectively question the optimal use of art spaces, the exhibition medium and the art experience at a time characterised by persistent market thinking within art, aimed at individual success and competition within a culture that functions on the basis of time pressure and high performance. By asking other artists to collectively join The Practice of Brenda Tempelaar, the roots of individual marketing and authorship in art are traced and eroded, in harmonious and conflicting moments. In addition, this distancing of the personal name creates a different form of address, and possibly a different liability. The host institution A Tale of A Tub and the public are also invited to affiliate and become stakeholders in this practice.

Introduction

“Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I started a political party. Of course there are many important issues to talk about these days, but my party would focus on the social and spiritual potential of water. Many former bath houses have been turned into cultural venues, and with this shift we have lost the opportunity to take a public bath and melt together. The Water Party would like to flip this by reintroducing communal liquid love into the art center. We will activate our fluid agenda by offering visitors the opportunity to soak in a wooden hot tub, returning to the warmth of the womb. Along with this embodied practice of intimacy, artworks are presented which promote the various ideals of the party such as: matriarchy, collaboration, divine holding, sharing pain as a form of resilience, and soul-flooding for (instead of brainstorming) an alternative sex education.”

The exhibition The Water Party by David Bernstein takes the artist’s eponymous text published in Metropolis M as a starting point to imagine the presentation of a fictional political party that propagandizes the social, spiritual and philosophical value of water to our society. A Tale of A Tub is transformed back into its historical function of a communal public bath house and meeting place. This aspect is of great importance to Bernstein, whose work is about meeting with people and sharing ideas. His installations usually possess a performative character, whereby the audience is the viewer, listener and participant at the same time. On the ground floor he has installed a big wooden hot tub where visitors are invited to bathe and melt, soaking knowledge together, returning to the warmth of the womb. The tub not only refers to the Japanese ofuro (soaking tub) and Mikvah (Jewish ritual bath), but it also carries a deep connection with his mother and grandmother who share a love of baths. Along with this embodied practice, artworks are presented which promote the fluid ideals of The Water Party such as: matriarchy, collaboration, divine holding, sharing pain as a form of resilience, and soul-flooding (instead of brainstorming). Many of the pieces presented come from collaborations or from friends as he sees the act of invitation as an extension of his individual practice. Some works are presented on top of other works and some join a collection taking on a new temporary title and role. This expresses his belief in the flexibility of objects and meaning. In this sense, water is taken as a metaphorical starting point, an intuitive process for finding relationships between things. At it’s core, The Water Party asks you to believe in the other, the unknown, and the things we don’t completely understand. When leaving the exhibition, one might find themselves humming a katschy (kitschy catchy) song from the seventies, (They Long to Be) Close to You, by the Carpenters. This is chosen as the party’s anthem because being together intimately, compassionately, and spiritually is their main message.

Program
Every other Sunday, a listening session is organized with an invited host.
22 September – Myriam Lefkowitz
06 October – Liu Chao-tze
20 October – Viktorija Rybakova
3 November – Paoletta Holst

Introduction

Link.

I am in the studio, it is admin time. I open the mailbox, there is a new message from the photographer that documented my latest exhibition. He has provided the images of my work in tiff format only, so I convert the set to low-res jpegs in order to update my website and portfolio accordingly. Then I forward an earlier video work from 2008, via WeTransfer, to an artist-run space in Brussels. They are hosting a symposium on ‘Clean Aesthetics,’ but I won’t attend since my travel expenses cannot be reimbursed through “sudden budget limitations.” At the same time – upload time estimated at 2 hours and 41 minutes – I try to work through a pile of receipts I kept from my short residency in Riga earlier this year, as VAT returns are due in two days. Can I declare food and drink costs? The studio visit that was planned for later this afternoon was cancelled by the curator, and instead I spend some time on Facebook and Mousse Magazine’s website, rather than starting to read “Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism” by Graham Harman. Supposedly, this text could inform a new series of work… I leave the studio. I am taking over a shift from a colleague at the espresso bar… 

The group exhibition Ways of Working, According to an Office Desk brings together works by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Céline Berger, Dina Danish, Jakup Ferri, David Horvitz, Sally O’Reilly and Colin Perry, and revolves around the question: “How to profess, rather than how to professionalise?”

In our time-pressured culture of high-performance, the position and activities of the artist remain subjected to an imperative to perform. In that, a substantial part of the artistic working field maintains a climate that relies heavily on a market(ing)-driven way of thinking, in which the value of professionalisation is firmly embedded within, for instance, the systems of art education, market mechanisms, the majority of grant application policies and public art commissions. This ongoing articulation of “professional practice” undoubtedly has a strong influence on the ways artists conduct their work, and by what means they relate and respond to a system in which professionalisation has become inherent to self-organisation: the artist taking the role of the manager-without-team, single-handedly facing the world. At the same time, from an external perspective, one could sense an incongruity between the different ways in which artists’ work today, and how this is being perceived and informed more generally, through common thinking and behaviour, and predominantly by means of media (mis)representation. For example, the idea of impoverishment and scarcity – a vow-of-poverty – as a tool for critical thinking and production that remains a viable myth.

Ultimately, the exhibition intends to strike a balance between the urges of professionalisation inherent to the arts, as opposed by some persistent stereotypes that overshadow the ways in which artists practice and profess today. In that, the works put forward different perspectives on, for instance, the condition of the artist who needs to support his or her practice through a day job (Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan), or the frustration triggered by the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, and to remind oneself to prioritise studio time instead (David Horvitz). Other works look into the role lists with artist names play, exchanged among peers, in order to further inform and advance one’s practice (Dina Danish), the dominant position of International Art English within the contemporary art world, and by what means the centrality of this language affects non–English speaking artists (Jakup Ferri), or the rapprochement of the art and the business world in the Netherlands, addressed through a risk analysis workshop (Céline Berger). Finally, the work Do I Really Look Like That (Sally O’Reilly and Colin Perry) presents a montage of misrepresentations of art and artists on television.

Introduction

The text The Whole Universe Wants To Be Touched takes the shape of an interview between Suzanne Wallinga and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, concerning their respective curatorial practices. Departing from the recent release of The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar, the interview addresses the relations between fiction, literature, poetry and philosophy and the field of curating and exhibition-making. The text is published in Metropolis M Issue 2, April-May 2018.

Introduction

Within the Sound of Your Voice
Parallel Project for the 5th Marrakech Biennale – 2014

Within the Sound of Your Voice is a portable group exhibition at thirty-three rounds per minute. The exhibition is portable, taking the shape of a vinyl record, weighing approximately four hundred and forty grams. The vinyl is protected by a sleeve, which also serves to express and illustrate its contents — textually, visually, aesthetically. The sleeve of this exhibition has been designed to incorporate a third dimension: an architecture that can be unpacked and enveloped in another space, becoming a space in and of itself, or a space within a space. The exhibition is comprised of the voices of thirteen artists in the act of speaking, at times indirectly or metaphorically: Milena Bonilla and Luisa Ungar, Dina Danish and Gogi Dzodzuashvili, Dora García, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Marcellvs L., Lubomyr Melnyk, Clare Noonan, O Grivo, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Joana Saraiva, and Triin Tamm.

The ten exhibited works comment on the nature of the exhibition site and, more generally, on the context of the Marrakech Biennale and the city as a whole. In response to the biennale title Where Are We Now?, we felt an urge to explore a different exhibition format: to compose an analogy of examples that would allow visitors to come to terms with their time and space more dimensionally, by making its context seem strange, less coherent, and less grounded. In other words, the exhibition aims to make the listener the subject of a sequenced experiment, to overturn one’s epistemological maps, confront one’s preconceived knowledges, and (perhaps most importantly) to prompt and trigger a curiosity for the things in the world through not-knowing and not understanding.

Vinyl Record

The record is released in an edition of 100, and is available for €35. The record can be ordered via this website.