woensdag 17 augustus 2016

Essay: Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating for YEAR




For YEAR I wrote an article called 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'.

YEAR is an annual magazine published by Komplot and David Evrard in collaboration with the designers Pierre Huyghebaert and Uberknackig. YEAR is thought of as a non-linear narrative inspired from the "cause and effect" paradigm or more: "TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCE."

Its subjective approach, closely ingrained with the artists, curators and the experiences they raise, slips in commentaries or reports about different elements - exhibitions, interventions, conferences, books, objects - that appear influential. 

According to the principle of chain reaction YEAR addresses the journalistic model, organizing its content in the form of sequences. And YEAR is a scene, an experimental constellation, a scene as obsessive accumulation opposed to archives, distinction opposed to evaluation, narrative to order, cool to distance, taste to energy, beauty to sense, sense to idea, idea to experience, experience to life and life to style and style to knowledge and knowledge to power and power to shit.


Here's an excerpt from my article 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'

One wonders whether language can include a variety of voices and how collective work processes may be communicated. In Katharina Schlieben’s research on collective curating I saw my own questions, stemming from the practice of working in an Amsterdam based collective, repeated: questions concerning consensus and the possibility of a ‘shared’ language. These questions could be summarized as: If there is something like polyphony, than what does it consist of?

Question:
Would you consider the practice of Komplot to be polyphonic?

In between polyphony and symphony.
The polyphony is musical composition that uses simultaneous, largely independent, melodic parts, lines, or voices. It’s also the representation of different sounds by the same letter in a writing system. Composition. Independent. Voices and lines (as a narrative) are the words I have to recognize in that definition. It’s a system of writing, no more, no less.
If we decide to use a demo from a cheap sampler, that’s just something else.
It depends of what you wanna write, what story you have to tell…

- David Evrard, artist in Residency at KOMPLOT


Review: Volg de witte lijn: Esther Polak in Leeuwarden




Voor Metropolis M schreef ik 21 Februari 2011 een review over Esther Polak's project 'Nomadic Milk' dat de eerste etage van Hogeschool Van Hall Larenstein in Leeuwarden te zien was. 

Klik hier om het de review te lezen. 

Review: Eindexamens Academie Minerva 2011



Voor Metropolis M bespreek ik mijn 3 favoriete kunstenaars van Academie Minerva


- Janine van Veen

- Wim Peters

- Bastian Teeuwen

Klik hier voor de link naar de review op Metropolis M! 

Research article: 'The Murder' on the art of Jack Goldstein




I've written a research article called 'The Murder' for the publication A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture by Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, published by If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, 2014.





Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979) presents a movie in a regular cinema environment, but without any moving images. A Movie accentuates the experience of watching a movie and foregrounds the performative aspects of the practice of an artist who is perhaps best known for her photographs of ‘arranged’ artworks and objects. This publication is the result of an extensive research project into A Movie and its 2012 iteration, undertaken by researcher Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme during Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication.




The publication includes a research essay by Lütticken that places A Movie in the context of cultural developments in the 1970s and contemporaneous works by the Pictures Generation, a sequence of images from Lawler’s archive selected by Lütticken and contributions by art historians Debbie Broekers, Eve Dullaart, and Daniël van der Poel.





Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture

By Sven Lütticken, Louise Lawler

Edited by Tanja Baudoin, Sven Lütticken

Designed by Will Holder

Distribution by Idea Books

Published by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2014

ISBN: 978-90-814471-6-4

Order via shop@ificantdance.org

Price: €15,–



Excerpt from 'The Murder'

by Debbie Broekers

Memory plays an important role in this context and Goldstein was very interested in the workings of the memory, working with sound precisely because sound sets memory in motion: “sound deals with depth, so it is much more analogous to memory – and that is what a lot of my work is about; trying to remember something or picturing it in your head”.[1] Goldstein’s usage of the verb ‘to picture’ is striking. As Douglas Crimp has also pointed out, ‘to picture’ can refer both to a mental process and to the production of an aesthetic work.[2] Both are at issue in The Murder, in which Goldstein created an image, or better yet, a representation of an image, in the minds of his viewers, with nothing more than a soundtrack and related light effects.


[1] Video interview with Jack Goldstein and Michael Smith conducted by Van Lagestein and students from the department of Art History (Groningen, 1979), archive of Art History Department, University of Groningen, Groningen. A copy of this interview is kept on DVD in the Corps de Garde archive.

[2] Crimp, D., ‘Pictures’, in October, Vol. 8, Spring 1979, pp 75-88.











Curated: I carried a watermelon


On the first of June 2014, together with Manus Groenen, I curated a one-day event for Locatie Z consisting of an exhibition, program of lectures, musical performances and a supper with artists, scientists, musicians and a curious audience.

This edition focuses on the allusion to Hollywood, film history and the cinematic in visual art.

download flyer

The program explores the potential of the subtle reference and the quote – the act of allusion – as an artistic strategy. Hollywood filmmaking is the point of reference for this afternoon of investigations in narrativity, cinematic memory and the blurred lines between fiction and reality. When we tell stories do we inevitably get tangled up in a web of codes and concepts introduced by Hollywood? Do we see life through Hollywood’s eyes?

With contributions by artists Sybren de Boer,Maurice BogaertLouise JacobsPaul de Mol andJowel de BruijnPeter van der Es, film critic Gawie Keyser and professor of film and literary studies dr.Peter Verstraten. Curated by Debbie Broekers enManus Groenen.

Download here the reader as presented with the exhibition, with more information on the artists and their work.




dinsdag 29 april 2014

Curated: Proof of a Promise: Excavating the Future


On the 23rd of Februari 2013, together with Manus Groenen, I curated a one-day event for Locatie Z consisting of an exhibition, program of lectures, musical performances and a supper with artists, scientists, musicians and a curious audience.

Dowload flyer including program here. 

This edition we used archaeology as a method to speculate on the future: to excavate things to come. 

Historical facts come to life when embedded in a proper narrative. But when we want to talk about the future, do stories need to be supported by tangible facts the same way? What would constitute such a fact? What properties make it plausible? Can we apply archaeological methods to get a perspective on the future?

With contributions by artists: Roger Hiorns, Paul Geelen, Thijs Ebbe Fokkens, Maarten vanden EyndeIbrahim Ineke, Saskia Laurant.
Lectures by Patrick van der Duin (futurologist),Maarten Vanden Eynde (arstist) en Áron Birtalan(artist/musician). 
Moderated by Saskia van Stein.
Curated by Debbie Broekers and Manus Groenen.
Download here the reader as presented with the exhibition, with more information on the artists and their work.
Please see the following video for an impression of the day!




maandag 3 maart 2014

Review: Nina Yuen at De Appel for Artslant Magazine



Link to Artslant


Like a great pop song or a poem, Nina Yuen’s work enchants, making you feel like she’s speaking to you alone. Her performative films, which are currently on view at de Appel arts centre, bind the universal with the ultrapersonal. They fill the second floor of the Prins Hendrikkade space in an exhibition consisting mainly of these short, fantastical films of approximately six or seven minutes each, plus some prints titled as studies for her films Andoe and Lea.
Although it is nice to see Yuen’s work in other media, her films are the real showstoppers. In Raymond(2014), which makes its debut in this exhibition, a male voice-over – representing the artist’s father – tells about the little fantasies he had as a child, how he could bend trees with his fingers and play guitar on the electrical power lines, which he could see from his seat through the car window. He talks lovingly about how his daughter behaved as a little baby. When he speaks about Yuen’s homeland of Hawaii, he says:
I will tell you this. Standing on our hill this morning, I looked at the land I chose for you. I saw a few green patches. A storm was moving in. I didn’t think of heaven, but I saw the clouds were beautiful and I watched them cover the sun.
Nina Yuen, Andoe, 2013, 16.9 digital video with sound, 5 min 53 sec, film still; Courtesy of the artist and de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam.

This type of prose, poetry almost, isn’t exclusive to Raymond. It is present in all of Yuen’s lyrical films and it’s endearing to find the words repeated in Lea, also from 2014, where the voice-over comes from the artist herself, perhaps signalling the strong relationship between father and daughter. Although this narrative repetition seems extremely personal and intimate, it turns out this isn’t exactly the case. The words come from A History of Everything, Including You, a short story by Jenny Hollowell, which is listed as one of the influences or “credits” the artist used for both Raymond and Lea.
We slowly learn that Yuen is a master of construction and editing, who mixes snippets of personal or familial history with the biographies of well-known figures from both art history and history more generally. In Raymond, for instance, the artist drew inspiration from such diverse sources as an interview with her father, Robert Frost’s poem Birches, and children’s songs Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul and Mary and The Unicorn by Shel Silverstein. By tiptoeing on the fine line between fact and fiction, Yuen’s vignettes are as personal and intimate as they are universal, as naïve as they are smart. They concern themselves with love, loss, life, and death. They are about growing up and becoming successful, about failing and fear, about artistic calling and creativity. And although her films are less fact than fiction, they speak a hell of a lot of truth.
Visually, Yuen’s films are equally rich, simmering with creativity. Sometimes the artist and her friends perform on camera, acting out or lip-synching the narration. One scene has the artist mashing leaves and sticks together to a voiceover describing the contests of male bighorn sheep (borrowed from David Attenborough). Other passages contain stop-motion animations and collages, which are full of color, unusual materials, and fast movements. Yuen works with a motley collection of materials – egg yolks and shells, flowery toilet paper, flowers, stones, fruit, trees, kiddie stuff like colouring books, glittering pens, archival and scrap book imagery, colorful folding paper, and a memorable rainbow plastic table cloth – that are as diverse and whimsical as the texts she uses for inspiration.
Nina YuenHermione, 2014, 16.9 digital video with sound, 9 min 34 sec, film still; Courtesy of the artist and de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam.

This exhibition's inauguration coincided with the departure of Ann Demeester, and with this poetic solo exhibition, Demeester leaves de Appel Arts Centre with flair. During her time as director, Demeester put the art space back on the map as a center for contemporary performance and time-based art and it’s great to see that the last exhibitions under her tenure – Nina Yuen and also a presentation of LA’s Chicano collective, Asco, who were active in the ‘70s and ‘80s – are a testament to this achievement. Yuen’s gorgeous exhibition is a must see for the coming months.