Kris Dittel

I work as an independent curator, editor and writer based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. My practice is driven by long-term research projects that materialize in various forms: exhibitions, publications, public events, performances, texts, talks, and more. I have an academic background in both art theory and economics and social sciences, which influences the way I contextualize and situate my practice.

My most recent projects include Unruly Kinships, an exhibition and research project co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska (Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne 2022-24), which looked into the possibilities of kinship beyond the nuclear family and the ways we may form relations with/in the world. My earlier work dealt with the notion of code switching (To Be Like Water, TENT Rotterdam, 2021); the voice as material (Post-Opera, TENT, V2_, Opera festival Rotterdam, 2019); and the question of value in art (The Trouble with Value, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow and Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016-19).

At present I’m working on two volumes as co-editor: Unruly Kinships (Jap Sam Books, 2024) with Aneta Rotskowska, and a children’s book Life with Fifi (Böks, 2024) with Angelica Falkeling. My previously edited publications include Spatial Folders: Extraction and Extractivism, co-edited with Golnar Abbassi (MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute, 2023); The Material Kinship Reader, co-edited with Clementine Edwards (Onomatopee, 2022), The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation (Onomatopee, 2020), Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter (Onomatopee, 2018), among others.

Besides my curatorial and editorial work, I’m tutor at the Master Industrial Design at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag (KABK), studio mentor Atmospheric Entanglements at the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and guest tutor at the Master of Film: Artistic Research in and through Cinema program at The Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. In a pedagogical context my writing workshops focus on autotheoretical and autofictional writing, and the politics of citations.

With Eloise Sweetman I co-hosts I Hope This Message Finds You Well, a podcast on curating. The latest, third season of the podcast focuses on the topic of the exhibition – as a format, medium and device – while examining its relevance, possibilities and limitations today.

Contact: info at krisdittel dot com

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Research

Forms of Kinship

1
Unruly Kinships

Exhibition and public programme
Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne
co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska
February–April 2023

More about the exhibition HERE and HERE

2
Festival of Feelings

a long evening and night of live performances, poetry, stories, music, dance, special drinks and food
28 April 2023, from 18:00 until late

with the participation of Liz Rosenfeld, mjellmë, Suzanna Ellis Slack, Roberto Barbosa, Angelica Falkeling & Lili Huston-Herterich, Clementine Edwards, Selina Bonelli & Thomas Reul, Andreas Bausch, Thomas Dahl, Karol Nepelski, Ja Jess, O*TA & pixiethera, Rage, Lisa James, evdokia michailidou, Haus of Audacity
DJs: hyperlovecollective, Hajnowisko
Ongoing performances by Matthias Conrady, katharinajej, Elena Weipert
Films by: Galina Dimitrova, Lucas DĂŒlligen, Moritz Krauth, Victoria Xiang-Rui Ruhe
Healing drinks by Julius Metzger
Food by Sofia Steffens
Stickers by Nikolas MĂŒller
Supportive presence by Danie Meyer
Moderation by Anbid Zaman, Kris Dittel, Aneta Rostkowska
with thanks to Meryem Erkus

Festival of Feelings was the closing event of the Unruly Kinships exhibition.

More information HERE

Festival of Feelings
They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life
A seminar with Alva Gotby

30 April 2023, 14:00–16:00

Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work ’emotional reproduction’, unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people’s well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction.

The seminar was part of the closing event of the exhibition Unruly Kinships.

More information HERE

3
Forms of Kinship – Study Group at Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne

The series of gatherings aims to think collectively about the way we form relations in and with the world, outside of the nuclear family structure. The meetings take place monthly, online. Each session is led by an invited guest, including artists, thinkers, poets, activists and others. The study group is convened by Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery) and Kris Dittel (independent curator, Medienkunstfellow NRW).

An overview of events and activities HERE
A documentation of selected events is available on YouTube HERE

Forms of Kinship – On the (Feminist) Contradictions of Parenting
With Karina KottovĂĄ and Barbora CiprovĂĄ

13 December 2022, 18:00–20:00

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON THE (FEMINIST) CONTRADICTIONS OF PARENTINGWith Karina Kottová and Barbora Ciprová

Parenting in times of today’s multiple global crises raises many question marks. What can we look up to and which models can we follow or establish in order to raise children with a future, capable of co-creating more sustainable and caring conditions for life, education, relationships, work and fulfilment?The online talk and screening offered a glimpse into texts and research materials on diverse modalities of parenting and relations with children that were used in preparation of an international exhibition project titled Beyond Nuclear Family, presented by Jindƙich ChalupeckĂœ Society curatorial collective in Prague, Berlin and New York.

Documentation: https://youtu.be/xHiouCrwDWc

 

Forms of Kinship – Neuroqueer Intimacies
with Francisco Trento

8 December 2022, 19:00–21:00

FORMS OF KINSHIP – NEUROQUEER INTIMACIES With Francisco Trento

Francisco Trento presented two of their work-in-progress projects on the topic of non-neurotypical intimate relationships, ones that deviate from the standpoint of neurotypical privilege. Francisco introduced their research on the stigmatisation of neurodiversity within online dating platforms and share excerpts from an article soon to be published in Culture Unbound journal. During the second part of the event, they presented a zine prototype, T*nder-bender (developed at the UrbanApa Home Residency). The zine discusses experiences of stigmatisation in the online dating scene as a neurodivergent person.

Documentation: https://youtu.be/FoxcFLRNz-0

Forms of Kinship – Daddy Residency
with Nahee Kim and Jiyoung Kim

31 October 2022, 19:00–21:00

A conversation between artist Nahee Kim and researcher Jiyoung Kim with a special focus on the artist’s project Daddy Residency. Daddy Residency is a project about Nahee Kim’s family planning with their unborn baby and multiple biologically unrelated daddies. The project is Kim’s attempt to contemplate how much our norms and desires about family are programmed as ‘natural’ and how Kim, as an individual in the hetero-patriarchal society, can override those. The event is a collaboration with Framer Framed, Amsterdam.

Documentation: https://youtu.be/oujABk0MQ4E 

Forms of Kinship – Ancestral Spirits
with Khanyisile Mbongwa and Li’Tsoanelo Zwane

7 September 2022, 19:00–21:00

FORMS OF KINSHIP — ANCESTRAL SPIRITS with Khanyisile Mbongwa and Li’Tsoanelo Zwane

During the talk curator Khanyisile Mbongwa and researcher/ healer Li’Tsoanelo Zwane engaged in a conversation about ancestral spirits and how they establish various levels of kinship. They discussed the way they relate to each other as Sangoma’s (shaman/ indigenous spiritual healer), the way we can shape relations with idlozi (the spirit one shares a corporeal body with) and brotherhood with ubuNgoma (the calling; the gift of healing).

Documentation: https://youtu.be/9lI9UQ1BlF8

Forms of Kinship – Polysexual Economy
An online reading group with Bini Adamczak

24 August 2022, 19:00–21:00

FORMS OF KINSHIP – POLYSEXUAL ECONOMY A reading group with Bini Adamczak

The love market is premised on competition between lovers, like any other market solely on the construction of scarcity. There are enough lovers for everyone, but not everyone gets one – or ten. The theory of polysexual economy apprehends sexuality as value-form, from the side of the exchange process.

 

Forms of Kinship – Radical Dreaming
A workshop and discussion with Georgy Mamedov

15 and 16 May 2022

FORMS OF KINSHIP — RADICAL DREAMING Georgy Mamedov

Forms of Kinship – The Material Kinship Reader
with Clementine Edwards and Joannie BaumgÀrtner

29 April 2022

FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE MATERIAL KINSHIP READER Conversation with Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards and a talk by Joannie BaumgĂ€rtner

The Material Kinship Reader proposes to think kin beyond bloodlines and material beyond extraction. The event included an introduction by the editors, Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards, followed by a talk by Joannie BaumgĂ€rtner. The talk, based on their text ‘Family Value: Towards a Kinship Beyond the Forms of Capital’ outlined some ideas on the way the nuclear family structure produces kinship through the capital form.

Forms of Kinship – On Family Abolition
with Sophie Lewis 

16 March 2022, 19:00–21:00

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION A talk by Sophie Lewis

Family abolition is a charged phrase which often prompts the impulsive answer “But I love my Family!” With Sophie Lewis we discussed what is meant by family abolitionism, what it has to do with love and collective care, why we should abolish the family, and its utopian vision. Sophie Lewis also reflected on what does family abolition mean in political contexts where the Indigenous, minoritarian and racialised family is always already pre-abolished. 

Documentation: https://youtu.be/GaRX1BVkQH8

Forms of Kinship – Liquid dependencies
with Mi You and Aiwen Yin

19 February 2022

FORMS OF KINSHIP – LIQUID DEPENDENCIES

Kinship relations are often thought of as relations of (ancestral) filiation, alliance, love and care, however, they also entail ownership, rights and obligations. Historically, social practices around kinship have variously strengthened or hindered the advance of capitalism. The nuclear family, legally coded and socially performed, is also a relation of production and reproduces capitalism’s inherent structures of domination. From the angle of a radical care, which both encompasses self-care and a relational, if not a collective practice, kinship can be reconfigured to include allyship and protectorship.

Organized by documenta Institut in collaboration with Temporary Gallery CCA
With Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery, Cologne), Kris Dittel (independent curator), Aiwen Yin (ReUnion Network / Liquid Dependencies), Moderator: Mi You

Documentation: https://youtu.be/w3a5BTxGrYY

4
The Material Kinship Reader
Material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family

Publication
Co-edited with Clementine Edwards

Onomatopee
April 2022

More info about the book HERE and HERE

 

The Material Kinship Reader cover rendering, design by Jena Myung.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voice as Material

Voice as Material is an ongoing research that explores the material substance and performative potential of the (human) voice in artistic practices. It’s concerned with the relationship between the gaze and the voice, the (changing) relationship between the body and the voice, and vocality as a site of continuous transformation and becoming.

As part of this work I’ve been collaborating with musicologist, dramaturg and opera scholar Jelena Novak, PhD. A major outcome of our joint investigation was the Post-Opera project, which included two exhibitions, series of performances and a symposium at TENT Rotterdam and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and the Operadagen festival Rotterdam.

At present my work looks into vocalization as a socially and culturally framed practice, with special interest in questions of the voice and gender, and I continue my collaboration with Jelena Novak as co-editors of an upcoming volume Singing Beyond Human.

1
Exhibiting the Voice
Journal Article
2021, PARSE journal n. 13 (2), On The Question of Exhibition 2
Co-written with Jelena Novak

The article closes a chapter with some reflections on Post-Opera, an exhibition co-curated with Jelena Novak. At the same time it is the start of a long-term research.

The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice.

The article in full can be accessed HERE.

2
Post-Opera
exhibition and performance programme
at TENT Rotterdam, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and Operadagen Rotterdam
co-curated with Jelena Novak
April-June 2019

More about Post-Opera HERE

3
Symposium ‘Installing the Voice’
at TENT Rotterdam
15 May, 2019

co-organised with Jelena Novak, PhD

Speakers:

Michal Grover Friedlander (keynote), Paul Elliman (keynote), Hannah Bosma, Kris Dittel, Brigitte Felderer, Jelena Novak, Veronika Witte, Katarina Zdjelar

The symposium Installing the Voice focused on the ways in which contemporary artists, composers and performers reinvent the relationship between the body and the voice. There is hardly any other artistic genre where the voice is more essential than in opera. Yet the operatic singing body was long taken for granted and overlooked. Installing the voice, in the framework of music theatre and especially of an exhibition, can be a strategy to make the voice manifest, give it a place, put it into position, and set it up for analysis or experimentation.

The one-day event gathered both researchers in the emerging field of Voice Studies, Musicology, Opera Studies and Cultural Theory, and artists who explore the singing body in contexts beyond opera. The participants addressed topics related to staging the voice, the cultural history of the human voice, the emergence of singing and speaking machines, the voice in the posthuman era, vocality and power.

Programme Committee:
Ivana Ilić (University of Arts, Belgrade, Faculty of Music)‹, JoĂŁo Pedro Cachopo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa / CESEM), Kris Dittel, independent curator‹, Jelena Novak (Universidade Nova de Lisboa / CESEM)

4
The Post-Operatic voice
at Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam
21 April, 2017

A conversation with opera scholar Jelena Novak introduced our convergent interest in the voice and body relationship from the perspective of contemporary opera and visual art. The event also included my performative talk ‘The Voice in Search of a Body’, concerning the cultural history of the voice and the quest to recreate the voice by technological means. The talk was delivered via my personalised digital voice.

Symposium 'Installing the Voice', photo Jasna Veličković
Symposium 'Installing the Voice', photo Jelena Novak
The Post-Operatic Voice, poster design by Team Thursday
Symposium 'Installing the Voice', photo Jasna Veličković

Value

A series of projects engaging with the slippery notion of value in and outside of art, and the value of artistic labour.

1
Notes on Value
Talk, symposium contribution
2021

As participant of the video symposium Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art, I engaged in an epistolary video exchange with researcher Laura Walde. Our conversation, referring to selected films and artworks, focuses on the value and meaning of images. Titled Notes on Value, the talk explores the question of value(s) and measures in film and in art at large. We touch upon issues of labor, the circulation of information and the distribution of images, the role of language and narratives, representation and faith. How is value, both economically and symbolically, tied to questions of visibility and recognition? How is the concept of migration (technologically, politically, institutionally) related to questions of circulation, representation and faith in images?

In the framework of the symposium filmmakers, artists, researchers and scholars enter into creative and experimental conversation with each other about the usages and understandings of formats in film and video art. The focus is placed on artistic media and practices in which the technologies and ideologies of measurement, their many validity claims and areas of application are addressed. The title of the symposium—Taking Measures—should be understood in its double meaning: as a reference to the practices of measurement related to the use of artistic media as well as to the political potential of power and resistance that results from these practices.

With contributions by Fabrice Aragno, Kris Dittel, Burcu Dogramaci, Monika Dommann, Carla Gabriela Engler, Omer Fast, Philipp Fleischmann, Ursula Frohne, Dani Gal, Alexandra Gelis, David Joselit, Thomas Julier, Fabienne Liptay, Jacqueline Maurer, Alexandra Navratil, Warren Neidich, Volker Pantenburg, Hannes Rickli, Benoît Turquety, Marijke van Warmerdam, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Laura Walde, Haidee Wasson, and Eyal Weizman.

The symposium is organized by Fabienne Liptay, Laura Walde and Carla Gabriela Engler (University of Zurich) in cooperation with Nurja Ritter and Nadia Schneider Willen (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst).

Find more information on the symposium website.

2
THE CURATORIAL UNKNOWN. Considering curatorial fees. 
Workshop, with Katia Krupennikova
2021

The two-day workshop was organised and hosted by Temporary Gallery, and took place on 30 April and 1 May.

The workshop aimed to analyse and articulate the need of freelance curators to secure fair working conditions and compensation. During the workshop we will introduce the current situation with fees in the cultural field in the Dutch context, where we are both based, and were amongst the founding members of the ‘Working Group for Fees and Conditions of Freelance Curators and Art Workers’ (2018-20).

Participants of the workshop discussed and shared with each other what is meant when talking about curatorial labour, questions of transparency, unpaid work, and how to calculate and collectively advocate for honorariums. We also looked into best practices of affiliated groups and associations. Finally, we  drafted some starting points for approaches and guidelines to formulate our working conditions for the future. The workshop was open to (independent) curators and art workers who are interested in collective organising and advocating for improved working conditions in the art field at large.

For more info visit Temporary Gallery’s website.

3
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation
Publication
Onomatopee, 2020

The publication consolidates the research behind The Trouble with Value exhibition series and brings together theoretical and artistic contributions.

More info about the book HERE

4
The Trouble with Value
at Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, PL (December 2017-March 2018)
and Onomatopee Eindhoven, NL (April – July 2018)

A sequence of exhibitions and performances The Trouble with Value engaged with the tangled story of the symbolic and economic value that a work of art holds, being a product of its maker’s labour. It provided insights into current notions of value and value systems surrounding us. The project explored various mechanisms of value creation and devaluation in art, the role of infrastructure in its circulation and valuation, the capacity of language, as well as that of iconoclasm as a mode of image (and value) creation.

More information about the exhibitions HERE

5
Working Group of Freelance Curators and Art Workers
Platform BK, Amsterdam
ongoing

With a number of colleagues we founded a â€˜working group of freelance curators and art workers’, in collaboration with Platform BK. The group focuses on pressing issues concerning working conditions for freelance curators and art workers in the Netherlands, with an aim to advocate for and improve the conditions in the cultural field.

Read our preliminary statement HERE

Translation, Language

The Economy is Spinning

Exhibition and publication
2016-17

How does the economy speak to us? Does it speak through us? Sometimes its voice trembles with fear, and at other times it whispers with hope and sings in excitement about better days to come.

The Economy is Spinning was an exhibition and book project, exploring the ways the language of economics and finance influences and frames our thinking.

Read more about the project HERE.

The Translation Trip 

The Translation Trip was a joint research trajectory with curator and writer Sara Giannini, composed of readings, talks, visits and encounters circumnavigating the concept and practice of translation as a curatorial device. Operating between 2015 and 2017, the nomadic meetings delved into insights on different understandings of translation as practice and philosophical metaphor.

A selection of sessions below.

More information HERE

1
Translation, Art and the Strangeness of Language with Sami Khatib
De Appel Arts Centre
June 2015

The inaugural appointment was the close reading of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Task of the Translator with Benjamin scholar Sami Khatib, PhD at De Appel Arts Centre in June 2015. The talk elucidated key passages of the text and situated the essay within Benjamin’s philosophy and dwelled upon the issue of universal translability beyond capitalist modes of translation. The public event pondered translation as the infinite after-life of texts and its relation to the strangeness and foreignness of language as such.

Find the recording of the event HERE.

2
Waiting for Self Seduction

a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee
in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition Bedroom Posters
Witteveen Visual Art Centre, Amsterdam
April 2015

A performance by three narrators, in the setting of ‘Bedroom Posters’, surrounded by bits of sky while boys are asleep.

It’s 3 pm. The gallery is open. It’s sunny outside and a beautiful light crosses the space. Three people are reading and talking about intimacies, dispossession of the self, pleasure, loneliness. I am turned on. I particularly like the way that pillow resonates with the words I catch: “Am I in love? Yes, since I am waiting.”

I pick up a text that is given to me. Is it a script?

Oh, I fell in love with a dead boy.

3
Private/Public

studio meeting and discussion with artist Sarah van Lamsweerde and invited guests.

The Translation Trip, Waiting for Self Seduction, a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee, in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition 'Bedroom Posters'
The Translation Trip, Waiting for Self Seduction, a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee, in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition 'Bedroom Posters'
The Translation Trip, Waiting for Self Seduction, a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee, in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition 'Bedroom Posters'
The Translation Trip, Waiting for Self Seduction, a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee, in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition 'Bedroom Posters'
The Translation Trip, Translation, Art and the Strangeness of Language with Sami Khatib, De Appel Arts Centre 2015
The Translation Trip, Private/Public, a studio meeting with Sarah van Lamsweerde
The Translation Trip, Private/Public, a studio meeting with Sarah van Lamsweerde
The Translation Trip, Private/Public, a studio meeting with Sarah van Lamsweerde
The Translation Trip, Waiting for Self Seduction, a reading performance by Kris Dittel, Sara Giannini and Sam Samiee, in the setting of Samiee’s exhibition 'Bedroom Posters'

More coming soon.

Exhibitions and Projects

Podcast: I Hope This Message Finds You Well

I Hope This Message Finds You Well is a podcast on curating hosted by Eloise Sweetman and myself. It grew out of our friendship and delight in talking about art, where we, two freelance curators, openly discuss and question what are we doing, why we are doing it, and open up this conversation to our colleagues. 

In each episode we talk to our guest about their work, professional trajectory motivation, and reasons to work as a curator or otherwise. The first season includes interviews with Lara Khaldi, Jo-Ey Tang, Clare Butcher, and CĂ©dric Fauq. The jingle is by the band Difficult, sound engineering by Nick Thomas and design by Christophe Clarijs. 

In the third, most recent season we are focusing our conversations around “the exhibition”. With our guests we discuss its status for curating, and whether we take the exhibition format for granted. We want to dig deeper into the exhibition as a location for the display and reception of artworks, a space of representation and liberation, and its limitations.

Listen to the podcast via SoundCloud, Spotify, ApplePodcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube and most streaming platforms.

Unruly Kinships

Temporary Gallery CCA Cologne
3 February – 30 April 2022

Co-curated with
Aneta Rostkowska

Participating artists:
Yin Aiwen, Nicole Baginski, Clementine Edwards, Robert Gabris, iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Joanna Stange, Pauline Curnier Jardin & the Feel Good Cooperative, KrÔÔt Juurak & Alex Bailey, Sethembile Msezane, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lena Anouk Philipp, Rory Pilgrim, Liz Rosenfeld, Selma Selman, Jay Tan, Geo Wyex, and others

Kinships are often thought of as blood relations, even more often understood with reference to the Western model of the nuclear family. This exhibition aims instead to contemplate and envisage various implications and forms of kinship, camaraderie, comradeship and belonging outside of the social reproduction of norms that the nuclear family entails. 

As curators, we believe that kinship is not given, it is to be imagined and made. And this process of kin-making involves a critical revision of the promises and fantasies of the nuclear family, as well as a collective search for new possibilities and structures that are yet to emerge. The starting point of this exhibition project grew out of personal interests and experiences, in search of a variety of ways of establishing care and love relations and to imagine other kinds of sociability than the nuclear family structure.

The exhibition presents various temporal and spatial imaginations, disorientations and understandings of kin-relations. They prompt us to imagine the present and the future differently, to envision a world in which solidarity, interdependence and other forms of intimate association and belonging coexist, one where we can make space and time to see one another in our abundance. 

Unruly Kinships reckons with the fact that no ideal version of kinship exists, there is no blueprint which relations can be modelled upon. And yet it strives towards perspectives and approaches that anticipate new solidarities, affinities and alliances, ones in which freedom in love and self-determination can be attainable for everyone. It is a leap into the unknown. How about then imagining collectively other forms of kinship? The unruly ones – not subjected to the imposed societal orders? Those which do not submit to known ways of living? They are disobedient, riotous, resourceful. How about reimagining kinship and asking again: How would we like to live? How would you like to live? The endeavour contemplates various possibilities of kin-making and care relations in our contemporary society. It presents various ways we relate to each other and the unexplored potentialities of these relations, starting from everyday interactions to artistic genealogies and queer lineages.

The artists participating in the exhibition and its public programme not only rethink but also re-enact “unruly kinships” themselves, albeit usually not in the known format of socially engaged art. They not only encourage us to reimagine existing kin-relations, they also search for different ways of sustaining them.

For example, Jay Tan’s large-scale sculptures, resembling an ant-formicarium, housing a series of scenes dedicated to various artists, musicians and writers with whom Tan shares a surname. The work references forms of altruism, questions of nepotism, kinship selection and eusociality in social superorganisms, like ants and humans. Similarly, Geo Wyex in his poetic sound work draws on artistic lineages, family members, memory objects. These “shout outs” are personal acknowledgements and public expressions of greeting and praise. In this work Wyex asks who or what matters, and how calling things aloud might become a temporary measure of liberation. Rory Pilgrim shows us alliances and connections between climate activists. They point to how climate change is forcing us to rethink the existing ways of living not only because the old ways degrade the planet (just think about the energy consumption of single-family houses in comparison to larger collective dwellings) but also because fighting anti-climate policies requires intense collective effort. Clementine Edwards’s unfolding miniature landscape, made of rice, gold, silver, copper and found materials, prompts us to think about the promise of the nuclear family, its unfolding, and being at peace with its possibilities and pitfalls. Selma Selman considers what values and relations society attributes to people, labour, relations and material objects, as she recycles scrap metal with the help of her family. Throughout the exhibition’s duration she transforms electronic waste into golden earrings for her mother. Lena Anouk Phillip’s fragile paper sculptures employ the mechanisms of the gift economy to reinforce amiable connections. In KrÔÔt Juurak’s and Alex Bailey’s performance, not only does their son Albert disrupt it and contribute to it, he also takes an equal role in its creation. The work speaks to questions of child-parent relations, parenting and emotional labour. Liz Rosenfeld’s work features holes, openings, portals, orifices and pores that are impossible to fill. Their work explores desiring and leaking bodies through the narrative of cruising. Pauline Curnier Jardin founded the Feel Good Cooperative together with the help of photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and architect and academic Serena Olcuire. The cooperative is a space for expression, inspiration and financial support for sex workers in Rome whose work is linked with the fragility of daily existence. iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo and Joanna Stange, together with the maiskind collective, perform a choreographed ritual of care and kinship. They invite the audience to join in their dance, joy and moment of collective transformation. Designer, artist and researcher Yin Aiwen’s live action role-playing game (LARP) is a life simulation and a generative social experiment that takes peer-to-peer caring relationships as the cornerstone for a commons-oriented, caring society. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a rich public programme. For example, it will include a series of gatherings, which combine lectures, performances, readings, music and food in an informal atmosphere. We would like to envision the space of the art institution as a space in which thinking about kinship develops in a collective way, a space in which kinship relations are nurtured. 

Exhibition view with works by Robert Gabris, Selma Selman, Rory Pilgrim, Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative
Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative, The Death of the Pope, 2023, eight framed engravings
Exhibition view, Jay Tan (background) and Selma Selman (foreground)
Robert Gabris, Inside Out, 2022, Paper objects, white cords, wood holder. Photo Simon Vogel.
Robert Gabris, Inside Out, detail, 2022, Paper objects, white cords, wood holder. Photo Simon Vogel.
Jay Tan, TANS/ANTS/TANS/ANTS, 2023, Wood from Rotterdam trees, spruce, aluminium foil, toilet paper, cardboard, polymer clay, various decorative bits and modelling materials
Jay Tan, TANS/ANTS/TANS/ANTS, 2023, Wood from Rotterdam trees, spruce, aluminium foil, toilet paper, cardboard, polymer clay, various decorative bits and modelling materials, with Nicole Baginski's drawing in the background
Nicole Baginski, I am very hurt, 2022, Ink on paper. Photo Simon Vogel.
Geo Wyex, Muck Acknowledgements, 2023 Digital audio, media player, cables, FM radios, two FM transmitters
Selma Selman, Mercedes Matrix ,2019 , performance video
Clementine Edwards, Promises and Threats: Me and My Dad Will Build a Whole Kingdom from Stuff I Find in This Playground by Tomorrow Morning, 2023, Liz Rosenfeld, Scores for Cruising, 2022, digital drawings
Clementine Edwards, Promises and Threats: Me and My Dad Will Build a Whole Kingdom from Stuff I Find in This Playground by Tomorrow Morning, 2023
Clementine Edwards, Promises and Threats: Me and My Dad Will Build a Whole Kingdom from Stuff I Find in This Playground by Tomorrow Morning, 2023
Lena Anouk Philipp, Coronadance, 2020, Mobile paper sculptures, and Rory Pilgrim, The Undercurrent, 2019–ongoing, film. Photos Simon Vogel.
Lena Anouk Philipp
Lena Anouk Philipp, Coronadance, 2020, Mobile paper sculptures. Photo Simon Vogel.
Performance Codemestication by KrÔÔt Juurak and Alex Bailey.
Opening performance Motherboards by Selma Selman, 2023. Photo Luise FlĂŒgge.
Opening performance Motherboards by Selma Selman, 2023.
Gethering and movement workshop with iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo and Joanna Stange. Photo Nathan Ishar.
Gethering and movement workshop with iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo and Joanna Stange. Photo Nathan Ishar.
Exhibition view with works by Robert Gabris, Selma Selman, Rory Pilgrim, Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative

In the booklet accompanying the exhibition an infinite love letter by Kris Dittel provides a personal account of the Forms of Kinship study group series. It is followed by â€œMayday” by Suzanna Slack, a fragmented memoir that touches upon the construction and violence of the nuclear family, gender and class. Alexis Pauline Gumb’s Black queer feminist genealogy puts forward the concept of revolutionary mothering (in a verb form) as opposed to motherhood as a status that is selectively granted. Only when more of us pursue “unruly kinships” can a larger societal change happen. This however would require governments to recognize the necessity and support different ways of living on a structural level. We hope that that text by Johanna Brenner expresses in which direction this could go. 

An important role in the development of the exhibition was played by the Forms of Kinship study group, which has been running throughout 2022 and constituted the public research phase of the project, operating as an open research platform. The guests included writer and researcher Dr Sophie Lewis, who spoke on the topic of family abolition and its decolonial perspective; professor Mi You (documenta Institute and University of Kassel), with whom we developed a seminar on the social and economic history of the family; Clementine Edwards who shared her research on material kinship together with Joannie BaumgĂ€rtner who spoke on the nuclear family’s relation to capital; curator and LGBTQ+ activist Georgy Mamedov, who introduced us to the radical potential of dreams; curator Khanyisile Mbongwa and healer and researcher Li’Tsoanelo Zwane, who spoke about ancestral spirits and Indigenous knowledges; artist and political writer Bini Adamczak, who unfolded for us the theory of polysexual economy; artistic researcher and social responsibility coordinator Francisco Trento, who spoke about neuroqueer intimacy; and curators Karina KottovĂĄ and Barbora CiprovĂĄ, who shared their research on the (feminist) contradictions of parenting. Many events from this series have been recorded and are available on the Temporary Gallery’s YouTube channel.

Links

Information on Temporary Gallery’s website

Forms of Kinship study group YouTube playlist

Full curatorial essay HERE

Downloads

Exhibition zine/ flyer, digital version HERE

Credits

The project is part of a larger endeavour called “Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions”, in which CCA Temporary Gallery works with six international partner institutions: Jindrich Chalupecky Society (Prague), Latvian Center for Contemporary Art (Riga), Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki), Julius Koller Society (Bratislava), Faculty of things that can’t be learned (Skopje) and Stroom den Haag (The Hague). Islands of Kinship is co-funded by the EU Program Creative Europe.

Funding and Support
  1. Mondriaan Fund
    Neustart Kultur
    Ministerium fĂŒr Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen
    Kunststiftung NRW
    Creative Europe
    The Kingdom of the Netherlands
    Kulturamt der Stadt Köln
    Deltax contemporary
    Hotel Chelsea
  2. Dance on Tour Austria

To Be Like Water

TENT Rotterdam
17 December 2021 – 22 May 2022

Participating artists:

Jenny Brady
Robert Gabris
Ellen Gallagher
Jumana Manna
Jay Tan
Amy Suo Wu i.c.w. Sami Hammana, Karen Huang, Sarafina Paulina Bonita, and Sandim Mendes
Evelyn Taocheng Wang
BĂĄrbara Wagner and Benjamin de BĂșrca
Katarina Zdjelar

The exhibition explores and expands on the meaning of code-switching. It aims to examine and complicate the notion of identity, and consider code-switching as a manifestation of a fluid multiplicity that operates within vectors of power.

In linguistics, code-switching denotes the practice of alternating between two or more languages in a conversation by multilingual speakers. Now, the term also commonly refers to the adaptation of a style of speech according to the group who is being addressed. In this sense, code-switching is the conscious or unconscious reworking of different cultural and linguistic identities, depending on different situations. As a performance of different codes, such as language, dialect, movement, gestures, sound, or rhythm, code-switching allows for significations of mutual belonging as well as differentiation. It is a form of translation, requiring certain knowledge of complex contexts – the “reading of the room” – and conscious or unconscious reactions to particular circumstances. Yet code-switching does not only concern self-expression. It can also be the result of an individual’s reaction to their environment, when code-switching becomes a manner to gain access, protect oneself, exclude others, or a way to â€œpass” as member of the dominant culture. Code-switching disintegrates identity as a single-subject conception of the self, and as a tool for social control and compartmentalisation.

Code switching is language, gesture, movement, a dance of the complex layers of the self. But it is also (self-)surveillance, double consciousness, subterfuge, the (self-)management of speech, of manners, of breath. It is restless, uprooted; it is fluid and ever-changing.

Exhibition view, with garment by Amy Suo Wu (i.c.w. Sami Hammana, Karen Huang, Sarafina Paulina Bonita, Sandim Mendes), photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jenny Brady, Receiver, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jumana Manna, The Water Arm Series, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jumana Manna, The Water Arm Series and Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Massage Series, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
BĂĄrbara Wagner and Benjamin de BĂșrca, FAZ QUE VAI / SET TO GO, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jay Tan, B is For Behind, with reflections of Wagner and de BĂșrca, FAZ QUE VAI , photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jay Tan, B is For Behind, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Katarina Zdjelar, The Perfect Sound, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Robert Gabris, The Blue Heart Series, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jay Tan, Soap Berries at Scholar’s Rock, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Exhibition view, with garment by Amy Suo Wu (i.c.w. Sami Hammana, Karen Huang, Sarafina Paulina Bonita, Sandim Mendes), photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Links

https://www.tentrotterdam.nl/en/tentoonstelling/to-be-like-water/?ref=home

A Conversation with the Shapeshifters (Amy Suo Wu with Sami Hammana, Karen Huang, Sarafina Paulina Bonita, Sandim Mendes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0K_V8k8xM0&t=3099s

Downloads

Download the exhibition texts HERE

Credits

The exhibition was initially commissioned by Sculpture International Rotterdam and developed in response to everyday cultural life in the city of Rotterdam. With special thanks to Dees Linders, Sannetje van Haarst, Tomi Hilsee, House of Urban Arts, and Shimmer for their role in various phases of this project.

Made possible by Sculpture International Rotterdam and Mondriaan Fonds.

The exhibition title is inspired by a quote from Bruce Lee, who advised to “be like water” in order to make one’s way through the cracks of life.

Press

Exhibition review ‘Als water zijn – kunst als code-switcher’ in Metropolis M (in Dutch)
http://www.metropolism.com/nl/reviews/45845_als_water_zijn_kunst_als_code_switcher 

To Be Like Water selected as highlight of 2022 on e-flux Agenda by Natasha Marie Llorens
https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/510489/what-s-next 

Receiver by Jenny Brady as most influential artwork of 2022  by Lena van Tijen in Metropolis M
https://www.metropolism.com/nl/features/48471_1_week_1_dag_1_werk_receiver_2019_van_jenny_brady

 

Post-Opera

Exhibition, symposium and performances
At TENT Rotterdam, V2_, Operadagen Rotterdam festival
April-June 2019

Co-curated with

Jelena Novak

Participating artists:

Jan Adriaans
Mercedes Azpilicueta & John Bingham-Hall
Adam Basanta
Paul Elliman
franck leibovici
Janneke van der Putten
Martin Riches & Tom Johnson
Urok Shirhan
Ho Tzu Nyen
Jasna Veličković
Suzanne Walsh
Geo Wyeth
Katarina Zdjelar

At the meeting point of visual arts and opera the exhibition examined the transformation of the human condition through the vocal sphere.

The human voice has historically been central to our psychological and social understanding of individuality and selfhood. Hence, the voice is intimately entwined with what counts as being ‘human’. The category of ‘human’ carries inherent non-neutrality; it indicates access to certain privileges and entitlements, to which not all bodies equally seem to belong to and allowed to have a voice. This begs the question: ‘what kind of voices are recognized as such, within our societal power dynamics, and what are the possibilities for “other” voices to be heard?’

Leaning on these questions, the exhibition project Post-Opera dismantled the opera world as one of the last unquestioned bastions of humanism. In Post-Opera singing machines and mechanisms, beasts animals and other ‘others’ sung in installations and performances that used opera as a theme and/or material. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human.

Along the way the project considered technological developments that shift the ways in which we look at bodies, voices and identities today. As we become increasingly accustomed to an intrusive intimacy with technology, and are surrounded by artificial voices, new questions emerge: In what ways do such disembodied creatures affect our understanding of what constitutes a voice? And how do such voices gain presence?

There is hardly any other artistic genre where the voice is more essential than in opera. For a long time the operatic singing body was overshadowed by the voice, being only a â€˜blind spot’, a taken-for-granted organic ‘instrument’, not considered important enough to be taken seriously in the process of meaning making. The exhibition drew from the experiences of postdramatic operas that often engage in a reinvention of the body-voice relationship, using technology to alter voices or to break the seamless connection between the singing body and voice, thus stretching the boundaries of the body and the voice and of the opera genre itself.

Paul Elliman: How We Learn the Old Songs, performance, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
franck leibovici, a love poem, 2019, multimedia installation, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Katarina Zdjelar, Reading ‘Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love?’, video installation, 2019, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Ho Tzu Nyen, No Man II, 3D animation projected on spy mirror, 6-hours loop, 2016, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, Two anatomical drawings, Collection Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Athanaus Kircher, Speaking Statues (1650/2019) and G.R.M. Marage, SirÚnes a voyelles et résonateurs buccaux (1900/2019), photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Martin Riches, Singing Machine (2010-2013), performing The Audition composed by Tom Johnson, 2019, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Martin Riches, Singing Machine, drawings, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Adam Basanta, A Truly Magical Moment, 2016, kinetic sculpture, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Adam Basanta, A Truly Magical Moment, 2016, kinetic sculpture, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Mercedes Azpilicueta and John Bingham-Hall, Scores for Rotterdam, 2019, performance, photo Zuri Ramirez
Mercedes Azpilicueta and John Bingham-Hall, Scores for Rotterdam, 2019, installation with sound, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Ho Tzu Nyen, No Man II, 3D animation projected on spy mirror, 6-hours loop, 2016, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jasna Veličković, Opera of Things, 2019, installation in three acts, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
franck leibovici, a love poem, 2019, multimedia installation, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
franck leibovici, a love poem, 2019, multimedia installation, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Jasna Veličković, Opera of Things, 2019, installation in three acts, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
performance Jan Adriaans, Swarming Chants at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, photo Gustavo Velho
Paul Elliman: How We Learn the Old Songs, performance, photo Aad Hoogendoorn
Press

Exhibition review ‘To obtain a voice (in our own affairs) – Post-Opera at TENT’ by Isabelle Sully in Metropolis M
http://www.metropolism.com/nl/reviews/38087_post_opera_tent

Exhibition review ‘The Anatomy of Voice: Two Views on the Exhibition Post-Opera’ by Ivana Ilić and Iva Nenić in New Sound International Journal of Music http://ojs.newsound.org.rs/index.php/NS/article/view/45
Download the article HERE

Symposium report ‘Installing the Voice’ by Caroline Wilkins in Resonate magazine, Australian Music Centre https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/music-theatre-now-and-post-opera-rotterdam-2019

Exhibition review ‘Post-Opera’ by Sven Schlijper-Karssenberg in Positionen. Texte zur aktuellen Musik  https://www.positionen.berlin/vorherige-ausgaben/120
(text available on request)

+ A cute promo video TENT made for the exhibition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZHkxDbNDA

Credits

With thanks to Mondriaan Fund, CBK Rotterdam, Stichting Stokroos, Fonds Podiumkunsten , V2_ , Operadagen Rotterdam. CESEM – Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music , NOVA FCSH – NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Culture Ireland en FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology

Design and implementation of computer network to sequence sound playback and light cues: AndrĂ© Castro

The Trouble with Value

Two exhibitions, performances and publication

Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, PL
16 December 2017 – 18 March 2018

Onomatopee Projects, Eindhoven, NL
22 April – 27 July 2018

Co-curated with

Krzysztof Siatka

Participants at Bunkier Sztuki

Rachel Carey, Fokus Grupa, gerlach en koop, SƂawa Harasymowicz, Monique Hendriksen, Femke Herregraven, Gert Jan Kocken, “Kra Kra Intelligence” Cooperative, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Louise Lawler, Adrian Paci, Ewa Partum, Mladen Stilinović, Feliks Szyszko, Maciej Toporowicz, Timm Ulrichs

Participants at Onomatopee

Benera and EstefĂĄn, Rachel Carey, gerlach en koop, Fokus Grupa, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Monique Hendriksen, Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Kornel Janczy, Adrian Paci, Feliks Szyszko, Timm Ulrichs

Exhibition and publication graphic design: Agata Biskup

The Trouble with Value discussed the tangled story of social, symbolic and economic value that a work of art holds, being a product of its maker’s labour; with an attempt to provide insights into current notions of value and value systems surrounding us.

Any artwork is subject to a web of assessments, expressed from the perspective of experts and audiences. Among those actors in this judgmental spectacle are curators, critics, art historians, philosophers, art dealers, and of course the public too. Institutions and the machinery of the art market complete this disposition.

Aside from the monetary evaluation of artworks and their unregulated market, the criteria for an artwork’s quality and its merit remain rather vague. Despite this fact, the contemporary art world is persistently fixated on the “value” of art: wanting to recognise what is “new” and “original”, “relevant”, “challenging” or “radical”. Yet, is it possible to truly recognise what makes a work of art “outstanding” or “contemporary”, those qualities which are telling of their time while also carrying universal modes of understanding?

The whole is made from a not-quite-transparent set of determinants that are difficult to break down. As usual, it is much easier to reflect on the past, for a look back provides examples of views and ideologies that defined – perhaps in a rather simple way – values and “qualities” of artistic creations. This is how the development of the canon of art has reached a condition where, despite continual redefinition and deconstruction, its rate of change is tardy at best. Well, don’t we all like tunes we already know?

Since the arrival of the avant-garde movement art has taken a progressive and experimental position, one which breaks away from tradition and introduces new ideas that sometimes do not receive appreciation and understanding during the era of their creation. According to many of its critics, the socially engaged ideals of the early avant-garde slowly faded into an elitist project in which only a continuous chase of “new and radical” impulses remained. Other critics consider contemporary art to be little more than an exceptional asset, a neutralised commodity that refrains from institutional criticism or engagement with the politico-economic realities of our time.

Today, when the methods of branding, marketing and aura-creation are the prevailing means for valuation the good-old invisible hand of the economy, matching demand and supply, is at rest.  The booming contemporary art market behaves similarly: without a set of market rules, it operates on the basis of an empathically fetishised commodity. Is art capable of escaping (and should it) a commodity fetishism that relies on the apparent autonomy of an artwork and its aura? How can we devise other strategies to value art?

The Trouble with Value aimed to locate and extract practices that bring us closer to understanding the potential of art to represent different notions of value in the contemporary. How can we counter the certain apathy of the contemporary to engage with positions that resist this mood and present us with challenging perspectives on value? The project attempted to locate artistic and institutional practices that offer viewpoints beyond the strategy of blending-in and conforming to expectations.

In the light of the above, an investigation into the sources of an artwork’s value, the values it may create and the value systems it is subject to is an arduous, if not simply naĂŻve task – for all methods, theories and ideologies fail. It is impossible to lay out the basic arguments in a singular, clear and precise manner but it is possible to distinguish several attitudes within the practices of contemporary artists as being notable for their reflections on the difficult process of cultivating value in a work of art.

One such aspect is the role of language in building narratives and providing a layer of immateriality to complete a work of art. We may also take into consideration the variety of modes artists (de-)value and disseminate their artworks. The infrastructure of art and the institution’s role in the circulation and presentation of art is certainly one we cannot disregard. Furthermore, we would like to consider iconoclasm as a mode of image and value creation along with matters of the canon of art in globalised society. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge and problematise the question of artistic labour and its modes of valuation inside and outside of its institutions.

Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Broken Thinker, 2009-ongoing, and Karolina Grzywnowicz, Still Life, black oak sculpture, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Louise Lawler, Moon (placed and pulled), 2014/2015, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Studio FilmLove
Mladen Stilinović, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist, acrylic on artificial silk 1992, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Studio FilmLove
The Trouble with Value, Bunkier Sztuki, background: Gert Han Kocken, Judenporzellan, 2009, photo Studio FilmLove
Fokus Grupa, Map of Invisible Matter, wallpaper, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Fokus Grupa
Fokus Grupa and Mladen Stilinović at Bunkier Sztuki, photo Fokus Grupa
Feliks szyszko ,Art Box Mondrian, lithography and acrylic on board, 1972, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Rachel Carey, Liquidate it All Away, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Rachel Carey, Liquidate it All Away, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Rachel Carey, Liquidate it All Away, installation detail, Photo Rachel Carey
gerlach en koop, Dispersion, half a sheet of waterproof sandpaper used to deface the head of a 1 euro coin (left) and the other half used for the tail of the same coin (right), 2010, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
gerlach en koop, Entitled, ‘vide-poche’ removed from a toilet in the former Générale de Banque/Generale Bank (managers’ quarters) in Brussels, 2017, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
gerlach en koop, Entitled, ‘vide-poche’ removed from a toilet in the former Générale de Banque/Generale Bank (managers’ quarters) in Brussels, 2017, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Fokus Grupa, Map of Invisible Matter, banner, 2018 and Monique Hendriksen, Naturally False, video 2017, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Benera and Estefán, I Work, Therefore I’m Not, drawing series 2012–ongoing, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Benera and Estefán, I Work, Therefore I’m Not, drawing series 2012–ongoing, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Adrian Paci, The Column, video, 2013, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Timm Ulrichs, Ich kann keine Kunst mehr sehen!, 1972, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
sƂawa Harasymowicz 12/6 site-specific multimedia installation including serigraphy, wall drawing and video, 2017, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Studio FilmLove
sƂawa Harasymowicz 12/6 site-specific multimedia installation, detail, 2017, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Studio FilmLove
The Trouble with Value, Gert Jan Kocken, Madonna of Nagasaki, Defacement 9 August 1945, 2010, Bunkier Sztuki, photo Studio FilmLove
Sarah van Lamsweerde, Tell/Sell, a Common Story: The Book of Collections, performance, photo Bunkier Sztuki
Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Broken Thinker, 2009-ongoing, and Karolina Grzywnowicz, Still Life, black oak sculpture, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Links

Information about the related publication HERE

The Trouble with Value at Bunkier Sztuki
The Trouble with Value at Onomatopee

Download

the exhibition guide at Bunkier Sztuki HERE
and the exhibition guide at Onomatopee HERE

Press

‘What Makes One Thing More Important Than the Other? Kris Dittel and Krzysztof Siatka in Conversation with Piotr Policht’ in Blok Magazine
https://blokmagazine.com/what-makes-one-thing-more-important-than-the-other-kris-dittel-and-krzysztof-siatka-in-conversation/

A photo report on Daily Lazy
http://www.daily-lazy.com/2018/01/the-trouble-with-value-at-bunkier.html

‘The Trouble with Value – Liquidating Artworks’ in Metropolis M by Nicole Sciarone
https://www.metropolism.com/nl/reviews/35708_the_trouble_with_value_onomatopee

Marjolijn Dijkman/ That What Makes Us Human

Exhibition and publication
Onomatopee
December 2016 – February 2017

Even though when we look into outer space what we see are light sources, carriers of traces from the past, we associate outer space with the future. For instance, in astrology the movement of celestial bodies are believed to have an influence on the future development of life on earth, and throughout history flyby comets and falling stars are believed to have brought respectively disaster or opportunity. This projection screen of human destiny has evolved into the ambition to conquer and colonize cosmic space, escaping possible disastrous developments on Earth. For many ‘visionaries’ the only way for humankind to survive is to expand human territories to the Universe.

In Marjolijn Dijkman’s film an asteroid, which embodies a potential threat for life on Earth, might as well become a prospect for the completion of the human desire to colonize space. The space-fiction animation presents us with the tension between these futuristic scenarios and evokes the human fear, curiosity and the ideological sources of such project. Besides these topics it circumnavigates an ancient fundamental human question: are we alone?

The accompanying multilingual narrative is a collection of quotations from various found sources, including science (astrophysics, cosmology, cognition) to spiritual approaches and historical resources, expressing curiosity and desire of space exploration, going back as far as 1500BC until today. The text is translated into Chinese and English accompanied with five other changing languages (Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Spanish), all largely spoken official world languages and relating to countries involved in important space programs, astronomical projects, search for extraterrestrial intelligence and future asteroid mining. These texts often speak in ’the name of humanity’ in a quite conflicted way. The multiple languages enhance the suggestion of a universal voice and in the same time add another layer of complexity in the interpretation.

The object on display That What Makes Us Human is a 1:1 titanium 3D printed reproduction of a Canyon Diablo Meteorite, which fell on Earth 50.000 years ago. The meteorite fits perfectly in a human hand and resembles flint tools that prehistorical Paleolithic humans used around the time of the meteor’s impact. The object, which might have been used as a weapon or a tool, signalizes the beginning of an era when human consciousness was evolving, eventually leading up to the development of technological devices that make a similar impact on earth as a meteorite. The titanium copy of the meteorite here rests on a silicone replica of a human hand – in times when humanity is able to create H-bombs, which may release larger forces than an impact of a meteorite. The sculpture is a speculative artefact dedicated to this evolution of technologies, and our quest for cosmic powers.

More info about the associated publication Radiant Matter HERE

Marjolijn Dijkman, Prospect of Interception, animation film, photo Onomatopee
Marjolijn Dijkman, That What Makes Us Human, 3D printed 1:1 titanium facsimile of a Canyon Diablo Meteorite, photo Onomatopee
Marjolijn Dijkman, Prospect of Interception, animation film, photo Onomatopee
Marjolijn Dijkman, Prospect of Interception, animation film, photo Onomatopee
Marjolijn Dijkman, Prospect of Interception, animation film, photo Onomatopee

The Economy is Spinning

Exhibition, performance programme and publication
June – July 2016
Onomatopee, Eindhoven

Participants

Mercedes Azpilicueta
Zachary Formwalt
Monique Hendriksen
Jan Hoeft
Hanne Lippard
Toril Johannessen
Robertas Narkus
Antonis Pittas
Nick Thurston

How does the economy speak to us? Does it speak through us? Sometimes its voice trembles with fear, and at other times it whispers with hope and sings in excitement about better days to come.

Economic jargon settles in to make things sound correct by making them sound familiar; it comes to our aid when troubles arise and comforts us with its reasonable-sounding justifications. Like religion, it gives hope and solace, soothes worry and anguish. The doctrine is everywhere, oozing out of academic studies and financial newspapers; ’efficiency’ has become the measure of the everyday, as ’cost-benefit analyses’ guide us to make decisions in the interests of the greatest possible returns.

This logic promises freedom in exchange for leaving things to take their own course: laissez faire, laissez passer. The ’invisible hand’ of the market should ensure that needs and wants are met without any outside intervention or regulation. Yet needs and wants are not governed by rational rules: the desire to have it all, to have it now and without limits, is a notion without end, with irrationality as its command.

The Economy is Spinning looked into various manifestations of the language of economics and finance, a language that permeates our vocabularies and builds the boundaries of our imagination. The exhibition considered the economy as a â€˜performing body’ that reveals its state of mind in its language. With contributions by nine artists, the exhibition accentuates and exaggerates the absurdity of this language and of its underlying mechanisms.

PS: “Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational”. So say D&G. It is “a region traversed by the irrational. Underneath all reasons lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it’s mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational.” (Deleuze and Guattari in Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte, 1995)

The Economy is Spinning, exhibition view with works by Toril Johannessen, Nick Thurston and Antonis Pittas, photo Onomatopee
Toril Johannessen, Words and Years - Physical and Economic Expansion and Recession; Crisis in nature and science; Logic and Love in Art, silkscreen prints, 2010, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Antonis Pittas, installation view, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Antonis Pittas, Clip (Untitled), 2015, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Antonis Pittas, installation view, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, installation view with works by Antonis Pittas and Jan Hoeft, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Jan Hoeft, Exit Strategies, installation view, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Zachary Formwalt, Kritik der Politik und Nationalökonomie, C-print, photo Onomatopee
The EConomy is Spinning, Nick Thurston, Van de onderaanneming of, Principles of Poetic Right, data projection, 2016, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Monique Hendriksen, Delusional Cause, performance documentation, photo Onomatopee
Monique Hendriksen, On Nature, installation view, 2016, photo Onomatopee
Monique Hendriksen, On Nature, installation detail, 2016, photo Onomatopee
Monique Hendriksen, On Nature, video, 2016, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Robertas Narkus, Contract, marker on wall, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Robertas Narkus, Contract, installation detail, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Mercedes Azpilicueta and Robertas Narkus, installation view, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Geometric Dancer Doesn’t Believe in Love, Finds Aspiration and Ecstasy in Spirals, installation view, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, not in the exhibition: Superflex, Financial Crisis, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, exhibition view with works by Toril Johannessen, Nick Thurston and Antonis Pittas, photo Onomatopee
Links

https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/the-economy-is-spinning/

Download the exhibition guide HERE

A chapter of The Economy is Spinning was hosted on the online archiving platform Unfold  (Unfold #3)

Info about the accompanying publication HERE

Eva Olthof/ Return to the Rightful Owner

Exhibition
Van Abbemuseum library, in collaboration with Onomatopee
September 2016 – January 2017

Eva Olthof’s installation Return to Rightful Owner invites visitors to consider the thin line between the private act of reading and the public space of a library.

Olthof combines ideologically loaded texts, carved on library facades, with the politics of forgetting, remembering and citing. The starting point of the installation and her eponymous book is the complex political history of the American Memorial Library (Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, AGB) in Berlin. This was the first American style “open access public library”, founded in the 1950s as a gift to the inhabitants of West Berlin, where for the first time different sorts of literature were made available there for every layer of the society.

The installation linked the observations Eva Olthof made during a research trip in 2015 to a number of public libraries in the United States (Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Detroit) with material from her book Return to Rightful Owner. In the United States these often monumental library buildings are frequently inscribed with texts on the façades referring to the creation of the American democratic state under the rule of law. The promises of free access to knowledge and information, literally shown on the façades of the libraries, are diametrically opposed to recent events in the United States. Edward Snowden could be put away as a traitor for sharing information which concerns that very democracy in America. These libraries served as a source of inspiration for the American Memorial Library, which implemented the same ideological promises in West Berlin.

Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, Access – Entrance, lightbox, photo Peter Cox
Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, installation view, photo Peter Cox
Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, digital prints of scanned and photographed archive material and text, photo Peter Cox
Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, digital prints of scanned and photographed archive material and text, photo Peter Cox
Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, digital prints of scanned and photographed archive material and text, photo Peter Cox
Eva Olthof, Return to Rightful Owner, Access – Entrance, lightbox, photo Peter Cox

Helen Cho/ 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining their Many Selves

Exhibition, performance and publication
July – August 2015
Onomatopee

Co-curated with Renske Janssen

“This bag contains an object for hesitation reimagining its many selves.‹Please feel free to take it with you.‹Look inside the bag only when you have left the parking lot. The object for hesitation is now yours.”

Helen Cho’s performance 21 Objects of Hesitation explored the materiality of ceramics in relation to her experience of diaspora and Korean roots. Especially for the exhibition at Onomatopee she delved into the core material of the earth, clay, to contemplate and explore the notions of moving closer to oneself and one’s external world.

Helen Cho is a Korean-Canadian artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her artistic practice consists out of various mediums such as poetry, sculpture, drawing, video and performance. Cho shows, both in the physical sense and the manifestation of that, a poignant desire for “object” and “image” making. Highly aware of the complexity of representation of objects, their material, and the prosaic yet seductive qualities of mass-produced materiality gain her attention. Cho’s artistic practice contemplates modest gestures and rituals. Narratives are suggested in seemingly trivial artefacts, locations and transactions of everyday life making her work subtle, sensitive yet outspokenly ‘necessary’. Her current project explores the approachability and allusiveness of ceramics that exists between arts and craft, but also in the artistic, the domestic, and between sheer object- making and performance. Cho researches the traditional medium on its merits to past and future as the terracotta material shows both strength and fragility.

Each day during the exhibition one unfired object of hesitation left the exhibition space and was placed outside, free to be taken.

Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, 2015, 21 unfired clay objects, a modest gesture; Photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining their Many Selves, installation view, Onomatopee, photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, 2015, a modest gesture; Photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, 2015, a modest gesture; Photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, Untitled Base: Ceramic Sculpture in Search of Objects, 2015-ongoing, ceramic, imaginary object; Photo: Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, installation view, photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, Tai Lam, film, installation view, photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, (left) Tentatively Entitled: Cloud, 2015, HD video, 3 min (right) Helen Cho, Tentatively Entitled: Earth, 2015, HD video, 14 min; Photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, Untitled: paper Suseok formed on 21 rocks from downtown Toronto collected between 2013 and 2015, papier-mùché; Photo Peter Cox
Helen Cho, 21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves, 2015, 21 unfired clay objects, a modest gesture; Photo Peter Cox

Project assistance: Lidia Vajda
Publication design: Gabriela Baka

Links

about the exhibition:
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/21-objects-for-hesitation-and-reimagining-their-many-selves/

about Helen Cho’s related publication (Onomatopee, 2015):
21 Objects for Hesitation and Reimagining Their Many Selves

A Blind Man in His Garden

Exhibition and performance programme
LUMA Westbau, ZĂŒrich, Switzerland
June – September  2015

Co-curated with

Emma Panza

Featuring works by

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pawel Althamer, Danai Anesiadou, Richard Artschwager, Melchiorre Bega, Walead Beshty, Monica Bonvicini, Mark Bradford, Maurizio Cattelan, Valentin Carron, Spartacus Chetwynd, Silvie Defraoui, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Katharina Grosse, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Ragnar Kjartansson, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Seth Price, De Rijke/De Rooij, Wilhelm Sasnal, Jim Shaw, Slavs and Tatars, Christopher Williams, and Pauline Curnier Jardin

Performance commissions by

Dina Danish Styrmir Örn Gumundsson

If our understanding of an artwork is always fragmented, based on factual information, a compressed image in a database or publication, lessons learnt and forgotten, can we allow our sensations and intuitions to take over our imagination?

The title of the exhibition refers to Joel Sternfeld’s photograph, A Blind Man in His Garden, Homer, Alaska, which prompted us, curators to think of the potential of visual artworks to trigger multiple narratives and activate various senses. By shifting the attention away from the visual experience of a lush rural landscape towards vivid sensations, possibly felt by the depicted man, Sternfeld’s photograph suggests the multiplicity of experience, beyond its visual effect.

The exhibition A Blind Man in His Garden was a fable with an open ending, a hidden path inside a network of mystical dĂ©jĂ  vus, where the garden eventually becomes a place where any act of imagination could find a space beyond visual connotations.

Indirectly the exhibition engaged with the subject of art collections, pondering the issue of personal taste and preference, as well as the hidden potentials and narratives of acquisitions.

Performance Commissions

Styrmir Örn Gumundsson, Trippy Tiptoe Tour

The performative intervention included costumes including red contact lenses, a soundtrack for each room of the exhibition and directed actions for the exhibition curators.
Find the video documentation HERE.

Dina Danish, Stages for Tongue Twisters

Three performances of staged tongue twisters, which eventually evoke their pronunciation by the spectators and participants.

 

A Blind Man in His Garden, exhibition view with work by Maurizio Cattelan, Jenny Holzer, De Engholm et Willumsen, Katharina Grosse, Pawel Althamer, Ragnar Kjartansson, Walead Beshty, Urs Fisher, Thomas Hirschhorn, Silvie Defraoui, Melchiorre Bega (lamps)
A Blind Man in His Garden, exhibition view with works by Danai Anesiadou, Slavs and Tatars, Seth Price, photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, exhibition view with works by Seth Price, Slavs and Tatars, Wilhelm Sasnal, Jorge Pardo (set of lamps), Laverrière Janette (3 tables), photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, exhibition view with works by Valentin Carron and Mike Kelley, photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, Philippe Parreno (Small Version of Guggenheim Marquee), Urs Fischer (What if the Phone Rings), Christopher Williams (Untitled), photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, with works by Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fisher, Pawel Althamer, Katharina Grosse, Ragnar Kjartansson, Thomas Hirshhorn, Walead Beshty, lamps by Melchiorre Bega, photo POOL
Performance Dina Danish, Pirate Private Property, photo Robert Huber
Performance Dina Danish, Pirate Private Property, photo Robert Huber
A Blind Man in His Garden, performance documentation Trippy Tiptoe Tour by Styrmir Örn Gumundsson, photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, performance documentation Trippy Tiptoe Tour by Styrmir Örn Gumundsson, photo POOL
A Blind Man in His Garden, exhibition view with work by Maurizio Cattelan, Jenny Holzer, De Engholm et Willumsen, Katharina Grosse, Pawel Althamer, Ragnar Kjartansson, Walead Beshty, Urs Fisher, Thomas Hirschhorn, Silvie Defraoui, Melchiorre Bega (lamps)
Links

More about the exhibition HERE

Exhibition documentation on Art Viewer:
https://artviewer.org/a-blind-man-in-his-garden-at-luma-westbau-pool-etc/

Sarah van Lamsweerde/ Paper Is a Leaf That Will Destroy Us in Its Fall

Performance, exhibition and publication

Performance at Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam
November 2015

Exhibition at Onomatopee, Eindhoven
November 2015 – January 2016

The meaning of a word is nothing other than the totality of its uses. – J.S. Madumulla

Proverb strings or mutĂĄnga play an important role in the oral tradition of the Lega, a group of people from the northeastern areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each string carries 40-60 miniature objects, which represent a proverb and traditionally function as carriers of wisdom. The meaning of these objects is activated in social situations, told and re-told, often in a debate and discussion, by members of the community.

Sarah van Lamsweerde’s project explored this past tradition and questioned what it would mean to develop such an ideographic device in this age of disembodied images and communications. Real and imagined metaphors emerge through strangely familiar but clearly contemporary objects, tales and actions, creating a speculative view on what forms of knowledge can be achieved and rendered from (im-)material interactions with our environment today.

The premise for this project presented aesthetic and ethical questions: what symbols to harvest from our contemporary jungle overgrown with Action shops and viral life-hacks? Is this form of cultural appropriation a dubious exercise or a good starting point for a collective conversation? Together with fellow-artists Esther Mugambi and Alex Zakkas, Van Lamsweerde explored to what extent our individual tales are collective and how (un)common our places in the world are. More than making sense of this world, they look for relations both mundane and mystical by examining seeds of thought, burning Doritos, and seeking ‘breaths of fresh unknown’.

Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, (2015), Veem house for performance, performance view, photo Ernst van Deursen
Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, exhibition view, proverb cord Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Berg en Dal, photo Peter Cox
Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, exhibition view, Onomatopee, 2015, photo Peter Cox
Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, exhibition detail, Onomatopee, 2015, photo Peter Cox
Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, exhibition detail, Onomatopee, 2015, photo Peter Cox
A circle without an end is a hook (cigarettes in the shape of a reload icon, object design by Alex Zakkas), photo: Peter Cox
Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, (2015), Veem house for performance, performance view, photo Ernst van Deursen
Links

https://veem.house/EN/paper-is-a-leaf
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/paper-is-a-leaf-that-will-destroy-us-in-its-fall/

More info about the accompanying publication HERE

Video documentation of the reanimation of a Lega proverb string from the collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren: https://vimeo.com/121610670

Performance trailer: https://vimeo.com/151302972

Press

Tijs Goldschmidt in NRC: ‘Use your legs and you shall eat’ (in Dutch)
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/11/26/spreek-woorden-aan-een-touwtje-1560669-a52552

Credits

Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall was a coproduction by Stichting Tre Tigri, Veem House for Performance and Onomatopee.

Concept and development: Sarah van Lamsweerde
Creation and performance: Esther Mugambi, Alex Zakkas and Sarah van Lamsweerde
Voice and Lega-proverb coach: Pierre Tombo
Executive producer, curator and co-editor: Kris Dittel
Dramaturgical assistance: Zhana Ivanova
Scenography, props and dress: Liza Witte
Sound advice: Piet-Jan van Rossum
Graphic design: CĂ©line Wouters
Production assistance: Anna Frijstein

Father, Can't You See I'm Burning?

Exhibition and publication
De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam
April – June 2014

Co-curated with

Renata Cervetto
Lara Khaldi
Emma Panza
Aneta Rostkowska
Kate Strain

Exhibition participants

Marinus Boezem
Justin Gosker
Jan Hoeft
Krõõt Juurak
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Ieva Misevičiūtė
Robertas Narkus
Pavel Pepperstein
Michael Portnoy
Jan Rothuizen
reinaart vanhoe
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Katarina Zdjelar

Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning? was a project co-curated by the six participants of de Appel Curatorial Programme, unfolding in multiple parts: a prelude, an exhibition, a series of events, footnotes and a publication, which brought together a score of newly commissioned artworks and texts, to be presented across time and space.

Conjured from the ashes of a radical inheritance, this project loosely reconsiders an important non-event, an exhibition that never happened, namely, that of the Situationist International’s proposal to Willem Sandberg to build a labyrinth in the Stedelijk Museum, in 1959.

A labyrinth?

Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning? allowed us – as artists, audience and curators – to infiltrate the building of de Appel Arts Centre, testing different tools and inhabiting existing infrastructure. In doing so, we twisted conventions into losing sight of their assigned functions and force them to mutate in a strikingly subtle way. For example, marketing platforms became exhibition spaces, presentation spaces became studios, storage rooms became stages, stairwells became sofas, and collaboration became corruption.

 

A Suggestion of Facts / A Reluctant Statement on the Politics of Compliance

Whistleblowers, Trendsetters, Firefighters, Arsonists, Situationists, Modern Heroes, here we are now, we want to burn, don’t we? Who said so? Who put the matches in our aprons?

I

In 1959, the Situationist International (SI) proposed to Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, to build a labyrinthine structure connecting the inside of the museum to the outside world. Sandberg responded that it could be done, but under two conditions: the SI should collaborate with the fire brigade and secure additional financial support. The Situationists withdrew.

II

What can be conjured from the ashes of this historical non-event? In this instance, we respect the radical decision of the Situationists (in withdrawing their proposal on the basis that its integrity would be jeopardized by Sandberg’s caveat), but at the same time, we would have loved to see possible outcomes resulting from this proposed labyrinth. If today’s art institution is so much shaped by rules and regulations, external expectations and internal fears, can the dream of an impossible labyrinth compel us to enter the realm of the possible?

III

The exhibition Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning? voiced skepticism towards a certain legacy of rebel- lion that we â€“ contemporary artists and active curators at large – have inherited. It is the legacy of non-compliance – as performed in the instance of the labyrinth that didn’t happen. We find ourselves in a kitchen with ready-made radical recipes for Molotov cocktails, with ingredients like the ideology of the avant-garde, institutional critique and art as propaganda. We drag this heritage of inhibited hopefulness into our present, we impersonate it, we disobey, we rebel, and then burnt down we come to a halt. Be- cause that is what we learned from our patronizing fathers and modern protagonists, who linger in cast shadows of misguided radicalism. We do not want to fall into that trap of fulfilling expectations and pre-molded formats. We do realize the urgency to continue, to carry the weight, but we are not going to be anchored down by this legacy. We’d rather carry the matches lightly in our aprons and cook with un- inhibited intuition.

IV

So what kind of fire do we cook with? It is not the aggressive fire of artistic activism. Nor is it the ethereal fire of beauty and sheer formalism whose only use is to keep the art market simmering. And it certainly is not a temporary glaze of fireworks – a mesmerizing spectacle aimed to dazzle. It is rather a material and sensual fire, inside a slow-burning stove, where meals are shared and stories are told. A rhythmic, repetitive and bodily fire. A phatic fire ignited by the energy of language, permeated with music. A fire of alchemy, not chemistry. An irreducible fire that was present in the caves of Lascaux, burnt the incense in medieval cathedrals and left the ashes for Malevich’s Black Square. A fire that – while appealing to different senses – propels incessantly and spreads in different directions without having any special purpose. An uncontrollable internal drive to perform, engage and experience. A fire that offers possibilities, not solutions.

V

We are dancing to prolong that fire in our belly. We are swaying in the present, blindly pursuing the call of the future. What can we give you? No saints. No sinners either. Only this: a fantasy of transmutation, a transmutative fantasy. Can’t you see the flames already dancing under our feet?

 

reinaart vanhoe, Banner, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Justin Gosker, Sphere, 2014, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
installation view with works by Katarina Zdjelar and Robertas Narkus, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Robertas Narkus, Turbulence 3, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
the clutter, curatorial intervention (functional space for talks, events, gatherings), photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Ieva MisevičiĆ«tė, There is no stopping this institution, installation detail, photo Carina Erdmann
Ieva MisevičiĆ«tė, There is no stopping this institution, installation detail, photo Carina Erdmann
Marinus Boezem, If you’d like to see this photo in colors, burn it, 1967-69, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Sarah van Lamsweerde, Tell/Sell, a common story, performance and installation, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
opening performance, KrÔÔt Juurak, Internal Conflict, jackets: Kunsthalle Beijing, photo Carina Erdmann
Jan Rothuizen Fantasio Again and Again, 2013-14, wall drawing, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
reinaart vanhoe, Permanent Loitering Space, 2014, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
installation view with works by Sarah van Lamsweerde (Tell/Sell, a common story) and Jan Hoeft (Exit Strategy), phot Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Jan Hoeft, Surface Drainage, 2014, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Jan Hoeft, Surface Drainage, 2014, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Michael Portnoy, The Roaster, icw RĂĄn Flygenring, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Michael Portnoy, The Roaster, icw RĂĄn Flygenring, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Justing Gosker, Sphere and performance By Burning We Obtain One Gram of Powder by Katarina Zdjelar, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Dina Danish, A Simultaneous Poem by Charlie Chaplin, Kurt Schwitters, IK Bonset, Lettrist International And Everybody Else, performed by participants of the curatorial programme
dissemination of commissioned texts, responding to the Situationist International's unrealised project at the Stedelijk museum Amsterdam, photo De Appel Arts Centre
dissemination of commissioned texts, responding to the Situationist International's unrealised project at the Stedelijk museum Amsterdam, photo De Appel Arts Centre
dissemination of commissioned texts, responding to the Situationist International's unrealised project at the Stedelijk museum Amsterdam, photo De Appel Arts Centre
reinaart vanhoe, Banner, photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
Links

Download the exhibition booklet HERE

Pavel Pepperstein’s short story, ‘The Tunnel’ was disseminated via an e-flux announcement, available HERE

More info about the associated publication HERE

Press

Review by Maaike Lauwert, initially published in Metropolis M
http://maaikelauwaert.com/articles/father-cant-you-see-im-burning/

Review by Saskia Monshouwer
http://www.monshouwereditions.nl/op-het-derde-vel-papier-staat-alleen-de-tekst-your-fired-over-de-tentoonstelling-father-cant-you-see-im-burning-in-de-appel/

Feature on Mousse :
http://moussemagazine.it/deappel-2014/

Physical and Virtual Bodies

Museum of Modern Art Arhem
February – April 2013

Co-curated with

Stephanie Seidel

Participants

Gabriele Beveridge
Barbara Bloom
Bonnie Camplin
Fleur van Dodewaard
Cheryl Donegan
Andrea Fisher
Nan Hoover
Inez van Lamsweerde
Rachel Niffenegger
Lidwien van de Ven
Barbara Visser
Christoph Westermeier

Portraits and postures, acquainted through media, advertisement or (art) history, are marked with the stigmata of the accustomed, the familiar and the every-day. They not only strongly shape our ideas of the (human) body but also create and reinforce viewing patterns and clichés of the perception of the very same.

Since the arrival of modernism artists were intensely preoccupied with exploring the capacities of images, their engraved narratives and their representation of bodies and gender in contemporary culture. In the 1990s new modes of digital processing and unlimited reproduction opened new possibilities for image (re-)production. The imagery of media (MTV), blue screen techniques and ways of digital image manipulation infiltrated contemporary ways of processing images.

The exhibition Physical and Virtual Bodies includes a selection from the past two decades, departing from the museum’s collection and invited artists, who present recently produced work. By the use of the media of photography, film and installations these artists confront and subvert the contemporary images of the everyday world and liberate their representational aspects. By applying different strategies, the presented artists endow pictures with new capacities and question the production of meaning.

By any means the artists aim to recreate or capture the body. But by reinventing its form they cause changes, certain distortions in the translation of often-familiar images and motives. Via mechanisms of abstraction, re-creation, appropriation or absence they challenge our ideas of the body. These bodies (present or sensed by their absence) become independent from their accustomed context and create a charged space between picture and the imagination of the viewer.

Realised in the framework of a curator-in-residence programme at Schloss Ringenberg.

Physical and Virtual Bodies, invitation card, Barbara Bloom, The Model
installation view, works by Fleur van Dodewaard and Inez van Lamsweerde, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view with work by Gabriele Beveridge, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view, Gabriele Beveridge, Fast Tanning Sunbeds, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view, Gabriele Beveridge, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view, Christoph Westermeier, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view with works by Bonnie Camplin, Inez van Lamsweerde, Gabriele Beveridge, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view with works byCheryl Donegan and Barbara Visser, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view with works by Nan Hoover and Rachel Niffenegger, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view with works by Barbara Bloom and Bonnie Camplin, photo Charlotte Lagro
installation view, Andrea Fisher, photo Charlotte Lagro
Physical and Virtual Bodies, invitation card, Barbara Bloom, The Model

Solid Enough to be Inhabited

Schloss Ringenberg
April  – June 2013

Co-curated with

Stephanie Seidel

Participants

Antonia Carrara
Daiga Grantina
Kelly Schacht
Berndnaut Smilde

Why bother with this prose when the castles in the air, shimmering through in a frenzy of speculation, were solid enough to be inhabited? 
(Siegfried Kracauer)

A castle, a stern monumental structure standing in the midst of a swampy countryside. This seemingly eternal building shaped by the events of past times, the force of the wind or neglectful past owners, has never played a significant historical role since its first stones were laid in the 14th century. Instead of bricks and mortar it is constructed from the vaporous material of fables and myths. These sensations seize the castle’s walls together and fabricate its status as a monument, which embodies a continual expansion of human desires and performance.

Solid Enough to be Inhabited takes those desires, fabulations and projections as a point of departure. Leaving behind the weight of history and flaws of memory, the exhibition proposes the creation of a symbolic space by the imaginary and puts the tension between the solid materiality of the building and its fragile status as a castle in the air into the centre of attention. The participating artists focus on this reality that is constituted from the imaginary, a fantasy that inhabits and transforms our physical world.

Solid Enough to be Inhabited
Kelly Schacht, Ruthless Affairs and Historic Practices, photo Simon Vogel
installation view with a work by Antonia Carrara, photo Simon Vogel
installation view with a work by Antonia Carrara, photo Simon Vogel
installation view with a work by Antonia Carrara, photo Simon Vogel
Antonia Carrara, Screensaver, image still
installation view with a work by Antonia Carrara, photo Simon Vogel
installation view, Kelly Schacht, photo Simon Vogel
installation view, Daiga Grantina, photo Simon Vogel
installation view, Daiga Grantina, photo Simon Vogel
installation view, Daiga Grantina, photo Simon Vogel
installation view, Daiga Grantina, photo Simon Vogel
installation view with a work by Berndnaut Smilde, Photo Simon Vogel
Solid Enough to be Inhabited

Theatre of Thought*

Exhibition and publication
Bonnefantenmuseum in collaboration with the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht
October 2012 – January 2013

Participating artists

Adrian Alecu
Clifford Borress
Christophe Lemaitre
Snejanka Mihaylova
Nathania Rubin
Esmé Valk

Six artists, associated with the postgraduate institute, presented recent works. The individual contributions support the concept of this exhibition, which has been developed around the notions of display, stage, body and performance. Using the metaphors of ‘stage’ and ‘backstage’ as two essential functions of the theatre, both rooms are seen not as a platform for representation, but rather as a synonym for a personal investigation into conscious and unconscious thought.

 

*title after the book of the same name by Snejanka Mihaylova
installation view, photo: Peter Cox
exhibition view, photo: Peter Cox
installation view with works by Esmé Valk and Nathania Rubin, photo: Peter Cox
Esmé Valk, What Belongs to the Present, film installation, photo: Peter Cox
Nathania Rubin, Sylvia and Ted Sketchbook, pencil, charcoal and ink on wall, photo: Peter Cox
Nathania Rubin, I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head, animation with sound, photo: Peter Cox
installation view, photo: Peter Cox
Adrian Alecu, installation view, photo: Peter Cox
Christophe Lemaitre, A Very Small Difference Between Two Homotheties, 2012. Event documentation of an exchange of works by Walead Beshty and Eric Baudelaire in the course of the exhibition, 2012, photo Romy Finke
performance by Snejanka Mihaylova, 2012
installation view, entrance, photo: Peter Cox
installation view, photo: Peter Cox

More info about the accompanying publication, titled Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice[a question without answer] and Contact [an unfulfilled desire] HERE

Press

‘In theater van het denken kan alles’ in Zuiderlucht (in Dutch)
https://www.zuiderlucht.eu/in-theater-van-het-denken-kan-alles/ 

B32 | F65

B32 was an independent art initiative on Bourgognestraat 32 in Maastricht, in a former textile label factory, which I co-run together with Chantal Le Doux, Katja Donnerstag, Claudia Falutoiu, Nina Grunenberg and Lene ter Haar between 2010 and 2013. A derelict building at Fransensingel 76 gave home to F65, our additional, temporary location. We organized exhibitions, performances, public events, manifestations, protests, film nights, dinners, concerts, parties, for a while even an artist residency of sorts. B32 still operates in Maastricht with a new team and location.

B32
F65
F65, lightbox installation by Adrian Alecu, smoke action by B32
F65
B32, Nicole Michniewski, sorry ik moest werken, 2011
F65
F65
B32, Taxi Detour prep
B32, Taxi Detour station
B32< Taxi Detour, exhibition
B32, Taxi Detour, autokino, animation by Nathania Rubin
B32, Taxi Detour
B32, Taxi Detour, installation
B32, Taxi Detour station
B32, Taxi Detour station, rtwork by Jeroen van Bergen
B32
B32

Publications and Texts

txtWe Contain Multitudes – Notions of collectivity, porosity and incidental ways of learning in art education

Review of the publication We Contain Multitudes – Expanding Spaces and Forms of Mentorship within Art Education and Practices, edited by Clare Butcher and published by ArtEZ Press in 2023.

Published in Metropolis M in January 2024.

 

Read the review HERE or HERE

txtKatarina Zdjelar | We need our bones. And coats.

Written for the occasion of Katarina Zdjelar’s solo exhibition BORDERWORK_REHEARSING PROXIMITY at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, December 2023.

 

This text is about love. It is also about Katarina Zdjelar’s two films Reading “Europe Where Have You Displaced Love?” and Gaze is a Bridge, which make me think about rehearsal, improvisation, intimacy and love’s political potential.”

Read the essay HERE

zUnruly Kinships (zine)

exhibition zine
published on the occasion of the exhibition Unruly Kinships at Temporary Gallery CCA, Cologne

Co-edited with

Aneta Rostkowska

With contributions by

Johanna Brenner, Kris Dittel, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Aneta Rostkowska, Suzanna Slack

Design

Gabriella Marcella

In the booklet accompanying the exhibition Unruly Kinships an infinite love letter by Kris Dittel provides a personal account of the Forms of Kinship study group series. It is followed by â€œMayday” by Suzanna Slack, a fragmented memoir that touches upon the construction and violence of the nuclear family, gender and class. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black queer feminist genealogy puts forward the concept of revolutionary mothering (in a verb form) as opposed to motherhood as a status that is selectively granted. Only when more of us pursue “unruly kinships” can a larger societal change happen. This however would require governments to recognise the necessity and support different ways of living on a structural level. We hope that that text by Johanna Brenner expresses in which direction this could go.

The zine is available for download via Temporary Gallery’s website:

https://www.temporarygallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.-Unruly-Kinships_32pp_Final.pdf

Unruly Kinships (zine), cover image Robert Gabris, design Gabriella Marcella
Unruly Kinships (zine), cover image Robert Gabris, design Gabriella Marcella

bExtraction, a trans-scalar inquiry

Spatial Folders:
Extraction, a trans-scalar inquiry

MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute, 2023, forthcoming June 2023

Co-edited with

Golnar Abbasi

With contributions by

Golnar Abbasi and Kris Dittel, Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto Suårez, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis

Design

Dongyoung Lee

This publication is the first issue of Spatial Folders, a thematic periodical that is produced by the faculty of Master Interior Architecture: Research and Design (MIARD) program at Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. It is composed of a selection of graduation theses alongside contributions by guest authors that focus on urgent socio-cultural, socio-political, and ecological issues that affect the (built) environment and its representation regimes.

This first issue focuses on extraction and extractivism that characterises the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Across time extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth. At the same time, these processes establish epistemologies and forms of representation that articulate extraction as natural or inevitable within the frameworks of anthropocentrism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, or hetero-reproductivism.

This collection of texts approaches the question of extraction from a variety of spatial perspectives. The contributions zoom in to specific sites, cases, and areas of interest while providing a critical analysis of various networks of power and influence across time and space. These works do not turn away from the material aspect of extraction but rather closely trace the spatial and material conditions and consequences of extraction in the case of oil, hormones, milk, wood, and water, among others.

more information:
https://miard.pzwart.nl/spatial-folders

ISBN 978909036882
ISSN 2949-9585
Edited by Golnar Abbasi and Kris Dittel
Authors: Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto SuĂĄrez, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis
Proofreader: Clementine Edwards
Design: Dongyoung Lee
Coordinator: ZoraĂŻma Hupkes

Book cover, design by Dongyoung Lee
Book cover, design by Dongyoung Lee

bThe Material Kinship Reader

Material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family

Onomatopee, April 2022

Co-edited with

Clementine Edwards

With contributions by 

Sara Ahmed, Hana Pera Aoake, Roland Barthes, Joannie BaumgĂ€rtner, Heather Davis, Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Lewis, Steven Millhauser, Jena Myung, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michelle Murphy, Ada M. Patterson, Kim TallBear, Michelle Tea

Design

Jena Myung

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making?

Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractavist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

Spanning fiction and theory, the collection of texts expand the idea of an artist’s book by bringing words into conversation with an aesthetic proposition. Clementine Edwards’ artwork is the visual weft to the book’s written net. From colonial conquest to climate collapse, The Material Kinship Reader tells toxic and tender stories of interdependence among all things sentient and insentient.

 

‘ The Material Kinship Reader is a beguiling orrery of ways of thinking, making and relating far from the shores of alienation. As varied as it is visionary, it tugs at and thinks kinship beyond “recognition”, a humming spectrum of becoming all kinds.’
Marina Vishmidt

‘This book is a constellation of crumbs, treasure together in a vibrating field. It’s about what it means to locate family in provisional formats, textures and arrangements, and the focused and felt reciprocity with the small stuffs that touch us, tumbling through around and before us, forming our very being. An errant riff, The Material Kinship Reader thoughtfully darns a loose and loved garment, pulling strands together to reconfigure ideas of family, care, property and memory.’
Geo ‘Gbutt1984’ Wyeth

‘A wonderful addition to the conversation about materialism and how we might live on after capitalism. Bringing together a sharp selection of core texts that have made key offerings to this dialogue with brilliant new theoretical and artistic interventions, the book is stitched together with Clementine Edwards’ searching material work and reflections. A generous and generative project.’
Alexis Shotwell

Order via Onomatopee:
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/the-material-kinship-reader/#publication_15407

Type: soft cover
Dimensions: 114 x 162 mm / 4,5 x 6,38 inch
Pages: 460
ISBN: 978-94-93148-78-9
Edition: 1750

Listen to an excerpt read by Hana Pera Aoake from their text On Water: Ko te wai te ora o ngaa mea katoa (Water is the giver of life), included in the Material Kinship Reader:

 

The Material Kinship Reader cover rendering, design by Jena Myung.
The Material Kinship Reader cover rendering, design by Jena Myung.

txtPost-Opera / Exhibiting the Voice

Journal Article
2021, PARSE journal n. 13 (2), On The Question of Exhibition 2
Co-written with Jelena Novak

The article closes a chapter with some reflections on Post-Opera, an exhibition co-curated with Jelena Novak. At the same time it is the start of a long-term research.

The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice. In the Western world, the notion of “having a voice” is commonly associated with the right to have a vote, to have a voice in society, often expressed in individualised and humanistic terms. Critics of humanism, and in particular critical posthumanists, have already pointed out the non-neutrality and inherent privileges the term carries, with its underlying connection to white, patriarchal, anthropocentric and colonial meanings. Instead of this rather Eurocentric conception of the voice, Post-Opera demonstrated a disconnect between this view and brought forth a proposition where singing machines, mechanisms, beasts, animals and other “others” joined in a collective form of vocal expression. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human. This way Post-Opera proposed a different ontological understanding of voices and their potentialities, as well as the variety of ways voices are let to be heard.This text reflects on the ways in which the exhibition and surrounding programme materialised on the intersections of visual art and postdramatic opera, while confronting voice studies and theories of critical posthumanism in order to posit the voice beyond its humanist license.

The article in full can be accessed HERE or HERE.

bThe Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation

Published by Onomatopee
April 2020

With contributions by

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Rachel Carey, Kris Dittel, Fokus Grupa, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Maria Hussakows- ka-Szyszko, gerlach en koop, SƂawa Harasymowicz, Monique Hen- driksen, Femke Herregraven, Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt, Kornel Janczy, Kra Kra Intelligence Cooperative, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Ewa Partum, Arkadiusz PóƂtorak, Krzysztof Siatka, Mladen Stilinović, and Maciej Toporowicz

 

The Trouble with Value discusses the social and economic value that‹ a work of art holds, being a product of its maker’s labour. This compilation of theoretical texts, essays and artistic contributions provides insight into current notions of value and value systems, and considers everything from the role of language to the circulation of art, and how it’s aided by the infrastructure of institutions.

Along the way, The Trouble with Value tackles the historical legacies of de-/valuation in art, the value of artistic labour, and art’s capacity to tell stories beyond mainstream channels of dissemination.

 

Download the introduction HERE

Available via Onomatopee:
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/the-trouble-with-value/#publication_12074 

Edited by Kris Dittel
Graphic design: Agata Biskup
Copy editor: Clementine Edwards

Type: softcover, including poster
Dimensions: 190×285 mm / 7,48×11,22 inch
Pages: 224
ISBN 978-94-93148-20-8
Language: English
Edition 1.200

The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, poster insert, artwork by Gert Jan Kocken and Arnoud Holleman, The Thinker, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee
The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation, photo Onomatopee

txtThe Trouble with Value / Notes on the Death of the Genius

Essay in the publication The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation

Onomatopee, 2020

The Trouble with Value discusses the symbolic and economic value that a work of art holds, being a product of its maker’s labour. The dynamic compilation of theoretical texts, essays and artistic contributions provides insight into current notions of value and value systems, and considers everything from the role of language to the circulation of art, and how it’s aided by the infrastructure of institutions. Along the way, The Trouble with Value tackles the historical legacies of de-/valuation in art, the value of artistic labour, and art’s capacity to tell stories beyond mainstream channels of dissemination.

This essay attempts attempt to make a claim on the disappearance of the figure of the Genius. Built up by popularised assumptions, the genius has come to be understood as an individual that responds to a â€˜higher calling’, a desire to create. Since the product of their labour is considered ‘exceptional’, this understanding also stands in the way of their being remunerated for their work.

Download the essay HERE

Find more information about the book HERE

bMarjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter

Published by Onomatopee
2017

With contributions by

Marjolijn Dijkman, Kris Dittel, Ken Hollings, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Raqs Media Collective

Edited by

Marjolijn Dijkman and Kris Dittel

 

Radiant Matter comprises of a series of artworks that are united in their desire to analyse and reflect on the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of speculation, fiction and spiritualism.

A central position in this book belongs to the Radiant Matter, an edited pictorial essay which the book lends its title from, consisting of over 250 images selected from various disciplines: astronomy, cosmology, medicine, technology and anthropology. Their colour composition is not coincidental; it is based on the gradient seen on scientific observations of cosmic background radiation. Since ancient times celestial bodies are thought to have had an influence on the human body, as oftentimes represented in the image of the Zodiac Man. Already in the 1800s electromagnetic waves had been discovered and some 100 years ago cosmic radiation was identified. Radiant Matter reconfigures such moments in history, scientific or spiritual in nature, in order to analyse, manipulate and revaluate their significance.

Read the introduction HERE

Available via Onomatopee:
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/radiant-matter/#publication_2194

Design by Salome Schmuki
Type: Softcover
Dimensions: 280 x 216 MM / 11 x 8.5 inches portrait
Pages: 88
ISBN 978-94-91677-76-2
Language: English
Edition 1.000

Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter, photo Onomatopee
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter
Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter, photo Onomatopee

bThe Economy is Spinning

Published by Onomatopee
2017

With contributions by

Mercedes Azpilicueta, Kris Dittel, Zachary Formwalt, Sara Giannini, Monique Hendriksen, Jan Hoeft, Sami Khatib, Hanne Lippard, Toril Johannessen, Robertas Narkus, Antonis Pittas, Nick Thurston, and McKenzie Wark

Edited by Kris Dittel

How does the economy speak to us? Does it speak through us? Sometimes its voice trembles with fear, and at other times it whispers with hope and sings in excitement about better days to come.

This book brings together contributions from visual artists, writers and theorists to rethink the way that the language of economics and finance influences our thought and modes of expression. Through artistic contributions, image essays and texts this book aims to manifest, across both art and theory, a poetic counter-language.

 

Available via Onomatopee:
https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/the-economy-is-spinning/#publication_2242

Download the introduction HERE

Graphic design: Rafaela DraĆŸić
Type: softcover
Dimensions: 230 x 160 mm / 9 x6 inch portrait
Pages: 160
ISBN 978-94-91677-61-8
Language: English
Edition 1.200

The Economy is Spinning, photo Onomatopee
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Rafaela DraĆŸić
The Economy is Spinning, photo Onomatopee

bAntonis Pittas: Road to Victory

Published by Mousse Publishing and Hordaland Kunstsenter
2017

Edited by

Clare Butcher and Kris Dittel

Contributing authors

Anthea Holly Buys, Boris Groys, Galit Eilat, Clare Butcher and Nikos Papastergiadis, Charles Esche, Steven Ten Thije, Rebecca Uchill, Natalie Hope O’Donnell, Jennifer Steetskamp, Jelle Bouwhuis and Joram Kraaijeveld

Published in conjunction with Antonis Pittas’s exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre, in Bergen, Road to Victory is a conceptual publication that extends Pittas’ artistic practice as well as an anthology of essays reflecting on his work and its various contexts. Together the book and exhibition present an artist-initiated re-reading of the seminal work of exhibition designer, Herbert Bayer, whose 1942 exhibition Road to Victory at the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a highly aestheticised and celebratory representation of the American involvement in the Second World War.

In revisiting this moment in the history of exhibitions, Pittas draws our attention to the embedding of propagandistic elements in artistic display conventions, ranging from the Russian avant-garde to the contemporary moment. Bringing into constellation a history of affect and abstraction in the exhibition space, the Road to Victory project brings together archival fragments, spatial transformations, new sculptural works, and textual contributions by a host of acclaimed authors. Each component is integral to the entire project, and intentionally sustains the suggested relationships between economic, historical, political and aesthetic trajectories.

Available via Mousse Publishing
https://www.moussepublishing.com/?product=antonis-pittas-road-to-victory

Designed by Project Projects
Assistant Editor: Virag Szentkiralyi
Language: English
Softcover, 288 pages
Size 19 x 25 cm
ISBN 9788867492572

Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory, photo Antonis Pittas
Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory, photo Antonis Pittas
Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory, photo Antonis Pittas
Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory, photo Antonis Pittas
Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory, photo Antonis Pittas

pA Blind Man in His Garden

Exhibition publication

Published by Pool, ZĂŒrich, 2015

Co-edited with Emma Panza

 

The publication is composed of a series of 15 posters in A3 format. Each poster features a title of an artwork from the Ringier and Hoffmann collections, including database information and description of the work, without its image.

The artworks (titles) in the publication were not on display in the exhibition, but they were present only through the medium of text, giving way to imagination, as well as highlighting the conditions and accessibility of artworks in closed-off private collections. Each copy of the publication is unique due to the particular printing technique.

Designed by Studio Temp

A Blind Man in His Garden
A Blind Man in His Garden
A Blind Man in His Garden

bFather, Can't You See I'm Burning?

Published by De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam
2014

With contributions by:

Sophia Al Maria, Mirene Arsanios, Marinus Boezem, Renata Cervetto, Sebastian Cichocki, Dina Danish, Kris Dittel, Chris Fitzpatrick, Justin Gosker, Jan Hoeft, Krõõt Juurak, Lara Khaldi, Yazan Khalili, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Vesna Madzoski, Mardi, Ieva Misevičiūtė, Robertas Narkus, Emma Panza, Pavel Pepperstein, Michael Portnoy, Aneta Rostkowska, Jan Rothuizen, Aaron Schuster, Janek Simon and Laurent-David Garnier, Kate Strain, Eloise Sweetman, reinaart vanhoe, Jan Verwoert, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Katarina Zdjelar, and Arnisa Zeqo

Edited by Kris Dittel

A reader, source book and non-catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition at De Appel Arts Centre.

Designed by Marc Hollenstein

More about the exhibition HERE

The printed publication is sold out. Email me if you are interested in a copy.
You can also download the publication HERE

Father, Can't You See I'm Burning? design by Marc Hollenstein, published by De Appel Arts Centre, 2014
Father, Can't You See I'm Burning? design by Marc Hollenstein, published by De Appel Arts Centre, 2014
Father, Can't You See I'm Burning? design by Marc Hollenstein, published by De Appel Arts Centre, 2014

pSolid Enough to be Inhabited

Published by Schloss Ringenber, 2013

Edited by Kris Dittel and Stephanie Seidel

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Solid Enough to be Inhabited at Schloss Ringenberg. The pamphlet unfolds into an A0 poster and includes exhibition texts, documentation and source material related to the exhibition and its site.

Design: Rustan Söderling

The printed publication is sold out. Email me if you are interested in a copy.

Solid Enough to be Inhabited
Solid Enough to be Inhabited
Solid Enough to be Inhabited
Solid Enough to be Inhabited

bMorning Prayer

Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)

 

Published by the Jan van Eyck Academy and Bonnefantenmuseum
2012

With contributions by

Adrian Alecu
Clifford Borress
Kris Dittel
Christophe Lemaitre
Snejanka Mihaylova
Nathania Rubin
Esmé Valk

Edited by Kris Dittel

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Theatre of Though*.  This source book includes individual contributions by the participants and documents the exhibition and its making.

Design: Emilio Macchia

 

The printed publication is sold out. Email me if you are interested in a copy.

 

Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)
Morning Prayer: On the Importance of Practice (a question without answer) and Contact (an unfulfilled desire)

txtThe Phone Call, Jan Hoeft: +4812

text published in Jan Hoeft: +4812
Verlag FĂŒr Moderne KĂŒnst, 2017

+4812 documents Jan Hoeft’s public artwork in KrakĂłw, located between two football stadiums. A football scarf mimicking the design of the two hostile clubs was placed on the side of a newly installed handrail. It was stolen each day and replaced immediately, its art context always denied.

I contributed to this book with a fictional story about micro anxieties of making a phone call in the age of disembodied communication, speaking to/through machines and finding oneself in the infinite loop of one’s fears and desires.

The Phone Call, Jan Hoeft: +4812
Jan H0eft, +4812
The Phone Call, Jan Hoeft: +4812

Recent and Upcoming

12 09 2024

Atmospheric Entanglements
Project Launch and Inaugural Lectures

12.09.2022 14:00–17:30 CET
online and in person the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven

Join us for the Project Launch and Inaugural Lectures of Atmospheric Entanglements with talks by Nerea Calvillo and Ravi Agarwal, who will present their transdisciplinary artistic research practices, followed by a discussion with Q&A.

Project Launch Event

04 07 2024

Graduation exhibition – A Moth in  a Room

Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design (MIARD) at the Piet Zwart Institute

04.07 – 11.07.2024

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam

More info HERE

01 07 2024

Out Now:
Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions

 

I contributed a text with ideas that framed our thinking about the Unruly Kinships exhibition and events program (co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska, Temporary Gallery CCA, 2022-23).

Unruly Kinships was carried out in collaboration with ‘Islands of Kinships’ in which CCA Temporary Gallery worked with six international partner institutions: Jindrich Chalupecky Society (Prague), Latvian Center for Contemporary Art (Riga), Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki), Julius Koller Society (Bratislava), Faculty of things that can’t be learned (Skopje) and Stroom den Haag (The Hague).

More info about the publication and orders HERE

28 06 2024

Artistic Research Week – Netherlands Film Academy

28.6.–07.07.2024

The graduates of the Master of Film (Artistic Research in and through Cinema) present their research  through films, multi-modal installations, and performances.

More info and program HERE

01 05 2024

I Hope This Message Finds You Well – Season 3

 

Listen to the third season of the podcast on curating I Hope This Message Finds You Well that I co-host with Eloise Sweetman.

In each episode we talk to our guests about their work, professional trajectory, motivation, and reasons to work as a curator or otherwise. In this season we focus on the topic of the exhibition – as format, medium, and device. We’ve talked to Eszter SzakĂĄcs, Sharmyn Cruz Rivera, Hendrik Folkerts, ClĂ©mentine Deliss and others about the meaning, possibilities and limits of the exhibition.

Listen to the podcast via SoundCloud, Spotify, ApplePodcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube and most streaming platforms.

 

01 01 2024

I wrote a text about Katarina Zdjelar’s two films, on the occasion of her solo exhibition BORDERWORK_REHEARSING PROXIMITY at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade.

Read the essay HERE

16 11 2023

Conference
Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection

The Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg
15.11.23 – 17.11.23
https://parsejournal.com/event/powers-of-love-enchantment-to-disaffection/

On Thursday 16th November I will read a fragment from my ongoing writing project, “An infinite love letter, on objects, desire, love, kinship and abolishing the self, etc. etc”.

28 09 2023

BOOK LAUNCH
Spatial Folders: Extraction – A trans-scalar inquiry
Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam
28 September, 19:00–20:30

https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/extraction-trans-scalar-inquiry 

Edited by Golnar Abbasi and Kris Dittel
With contributions by Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto Suårez, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis
Designed by Dongyoung Lee
Published by MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute

The first issue of the thematic periodical, Spatial Folders focuses on extraction and extractivism that characterises the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Across time extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth.

01 09 2023

OUT NOW

Extraction: A trans-scalar inquiry

Edited by Golnar Abbasi and Kris Dittel
With contributions by Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto SuĂĄrez, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis
Designed by Dongyoung Lee
Published by MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute

The first issue of the thematic periodical, Spatial Folders focuses on extraction and extractivism that characterises the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Across time extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth.

More info and orders: https://miard.pzwart.nl/spatial-folders

Book cover, design by Dongyoung Lee