What is a truthful image in a mendacious world?
Can photography be employed as a tool to desire differently? 
Can our cameras be used to touch, feel and move?
What are the images we need to unlearn?
And what are the images that make us act?

Over the course of 4 months ten students of the Photography Department of the Rietveld Academie have been formulating the core questions motivating their artistic practices. Examining themes such as queer forms of life and desire, the end of the world as we know it, the need for female empowerment, illusory representations of romantic love, the limitations of human communication, and the use of practices of quilting and graffiti as a political tools, they have each explored different modes of research, ranging from reading to image gathering and from writing to image making. 

On 25 January they will present some first artistic responses to their questions. We hope you will join us for this event filled with multi media installations, screenings and performative readings. 

Deelnemende kunstenaars zijn: Tasio Bidegain, Dora Lionstone, Sofie Bredholt, Marta Capilla Urbano, Shreya Desouza, Tomás Dudley Baker de Castro Feijó, Alma Kim, Luca Penning, Aurélie Sorriaux and Alizé Wachthausen. 

The project takes place in the framework of the thesis that the students work on during their final year and is supervised by artist and research tutor Dorine van Meel.

With Diego Diez as dealer.

For the performative installation Under the Influence, puntWG is transformed into a casino salon. A blackjack table is accompanied by a series of Verhoef’s recent paintings. During the opening visitors are invited to join games of blackjack. The game starts at 7pm. A prize is awarded at the end of the evening. 

This project is supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

* * *

The cards that make up a deck are A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q and K.  

A. When things are not quite going your way at the gaming table, the table itself is sometimes blamed. As in, no, I’m not feeling this table. From time to time the dealers are also held responsible for bad results. It doesn’t really matter that they’re just following a fixed protocol.

2. You, you are my lucky charm.

3. Is it because I failed to even open my mail that I can’t fall asleep or is it the moon?

4. What does it even mean, being born under the sign of Saturn? Anyway this is what the French call un triste.

5. On my way to do groceries, I realized my keys were still in the house.

6. In The Myth of the Eternal Return Mircea Eliade writes about the archaic world. In those days it seems that not a single activity appears to have been profane. Could life still be practiced as such? 

7. Back in the South gas used to be cheap. God I miss my car.

8. Socks wear out. Words wear out. Strings of words wear out.

9. At a certain point, even the little light in the fridge will break.

10. In The House of Cards, a painting by Chardin, I see a young boy sitting at a playing table building a house of cards. Epistemological shift: Chardin inhales the last bits of air pushed away by an outpouring of data.

J. At first whisper. Whisper random speech. Then making sense. Then getting intoxicated. Then the city in silence.

Q. I wonder if there ever was such a thing as the beginning. In the Hour of the Star Clarice Lispector writes that everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. 

K. I bought a plant.

Waiting for Sleep is a homemade CGI survival romance. The film recounts the last days of a young man - Will - who lives surrounded by zombies and who sleepwalks at night, undoing the protections that he sets up for his protection in the daytime. Outside the boundaries of the infected area, society as we know it persists.

Read an interview with the artist on warehouse.

Artist talk and debate: 11 Jan 2020, 16:00-18:00.

During these three days, the artist will reflect on her project “A House For The Un-Known,” which was developed in Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro during the year 2019. For this project she worked on the question: how do we live together in the urban context? This question led to the exploration of urban space, human and power relations, and of urban cultures. These observations made very visible a diversity of vulnerabilities within the urban construct, both in urban housing but also of the body within the city. As some social groups are more vulnerable than others, their body becomes more vulnerable as well.

The project explored how vulnerability is manifested and how could it be expressed through sculptural work, and other mediums. The pop culture of the city becomes a material for exploring performance. A collaboration with a Bijlmer rap artist is in  process as well as with urban dwellers.

A debate will take place after the artist talk on 11 January . The main question will be: how do we experience our living together with each other in the city? How is multicultural diversity treated within the gentrification processes? But also, how art can search for ways to live together? 

A diverse group of stakeholders of urban living is very welcome to participate of this talk and debate. Scientists, artists, architects, urban dwellers in general: feel welcome!

The project was possible to realise thanks to the support of the Mondriaan Fund and the Stichting Stokroos.

For more information about the artist: magaberr.net

Additional opening times:
22 Nov, 14:00-18:00
23 and 24 Nov, 12:00 - 20:00

Visual artists Oscar Santillán and Matthew C. Wilson, who have been in dialogue for almost ten years, present their works together for the first time in this two-person exhibition. In each artist’s own way, they draw out complex relations between seemingly disparate histories, methodologies, and cosmologies shaping the way humans relate to their present location in time and space. In Drained Atlas the artists present recent and new works bringing together the histories and speculative futures of scientific exploration as the entangled process of undoing worlds to generate new ones.



Public Presentation

Drained Atlas mini-symposium
Organized and moderated by Drained Atlas exhibition artists Oscar Santillán and Matthew C. Wilson

23 November, 16:00-17:30
Barbara Visser, Marjolijn Dijkman, Kyveli Mavrokordopolou

24 November, 16:00 -17:30
Ana María Gómez López, Frans Snik, Jo-Lene Ong

Barbara Visser, artist
Marjolijn Dijkman, artist and co-founder of Enough Room for Space
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, researcher and art critic
Frans Snik, astrophysicist
Jo-Lene Ong, curator
Ana María Gómez López, artist

Against a background of rapid environmental, social, and technological change, hitherto unknown worlds are at once being explored and created while others slip out of being.

The Drained Atlas mini-symposium brings together artists, researchers, and thinkers to discuss various considerations around “worlding,” seeing the world as a sentient system: not as a thing but as a process that is always coming into being through interactions, always contingent.

For humans, such contingencies include the available forms of human knowledge production and social relations in a given time and place. But in the present, most notably through the Anthropocene, human and non-human worlding have become ever-more entangled. It is within this context, in the search for new languages, affections, and critical tools, that the dialogue between art and science has become more relevant than ever before. Both are, for example, increasingly concerned with similar topics, from ecology to astronomy, and similar methods, such as investigative fieldwork.

The mini-symposium opens a space to extend possibilities and articulate open questions surrounding different modes of worlding. Each guest will discuss their own work connecting to this theme (found also at the core of the Drained Atlas exhibition at puntWG), proceeding to an open conversation between the guests.

It’s just after harvest time, the autumn of 1519. Or 2019. It’s the aftermath of…of what? Strange things are happening in the village. Rumours of plague. Just ask at the tavern: there’s something a little odd about this year’s crop, the baker has gone mad, and the brewer is working overtime. Something around here smells a little off…

You, the itinerant artist, have just arrived to fulfil your commission at the abbey. But to complete your work, you must navigate village life, and find out what’s eating this town before it gets you too. The bel is kapot, you have to knock to get in. This is an exhibition in the form of a riddle, or a riddle in the form of an exhibition, set in a space and time very much like our own.

KLOPPEN AUB, BEL IS KAPOT is a collaborative project by Ash Kilmartin and Bergur Thomas Anderson, with appearances by fellow townspeople Lisa Kuglitsch, Gunnar Gunnsteinsson, Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir, Sigrún Gyða Sveinsdóttir and Arbeiter. 

Ash Kilmartin (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Bergur Thomas Anderson (Iceland) are artists who live in Rotterdam. This exhibition is made possible with the support of AFK.

Performance

Title: Stonecarver’s Dilemma
Date and time: 19 October 2019, 17:00-21:00


Stonecarver’s dilemma (2019) working drawing. Bergur Thomas Anderson and Ash Kilmartin

Stonecarver’s Dilemma is a live choose-your-own-adventure in which the audience decides the fate of the young artist who attempts to live by their work, and by their good conscience. Live music, improvised foley, dangerous snacks and specially brewed drinks might just help with these difficult choices.

“I want to belong to the living” is an exhibition by Isfrid Angard Siljehaug, Anna Hillbom and Ann-Catrin Olsson. The artists wish to make possible a tactile re-reading of the past, where the agency of each artist's work at times is blurred, at times visible. A play with the relation of object, artist and agency in the gallery space, as well as in a broader sense of history writing.

Elements from art history, architecture, mythology and the body are used to enable a personal understanding of time, a rupture in chronology. By that bring out a possible mystic, a giggle, something skin-warm.

The title indicates a wish to bring to life fragments adapted from the past. Canalized and altered, they become animated shreds of something vaguely familiar. “I want to belong to the living” refers to the body's yearning for eternality. A fantasy about sculptures who long to be touched. Like John Berger is looking for the living in Greek sculptures.

”All the sculptures stolen from Greece who are now in foreign museums, are strangely un-sensual and that's one of the reasons they belong here (in Greece). The sensual in art is in a way a glorification of participation, a cohesion between body and nature. Here does no such cohesion exist. The famous ideals that the classic sculptors searched for was actually a comfort for the loneliness of the body. All these sculptures were, it seems to me now, mediators of a well controlled longing without end.”

- John Berger

This exhibition is generously supported by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Iapsis/Swedish Arts Council.

This is the end presentation of the current AirWG resident Mo Sirra supported by Mondriaan Tijdelijke Binnenlandateliers programme.

“Mo Sirra examines and theorizes the essence of creation. How can one mediate art? How can one create? And more importantly, how can one create 'freely'? This examination has deeply influenced his approach to cultural practice and is reminiscent of the (memory of the) sites or lieu de mémoire (site of memory) of the French historian Pierre Nora.

As Mo Sirra approaches art practice as an act of urgency, he focuses on the impermanent and spatially complex nature of art practice through his diverse and fluid work encompassing drawing, installation, photography, and sculpture. The politicization of life and hence art is one of his driving forces, informed and enriched by personal experiences leading to (hi)stories that entangle the first person with(in) the third--blurring the edges of a self-portrait.”
Lora Sariaslan

Artist Statement

The artist in question argues that art is an act of urgency requires practitioner and institution at state of emergency. Despite this prescheduled presentation; please be advised that the artist, the content of the presentation, the opening hours, the location are subject to change.

What if the human being inherited a contaminated knowledge?

What if ‘art’ is advertisement instrument for Capitalism, propaganda for other Ideology?

What if ‘freedom of expression’ is daily exercise, rather than an article in Human Rights Act?

What if ‘independence’ is a continuous struggle against suppression rather an inactive clause in a constitution?

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.