Official launch: Friday, May 22, 2020
Time: 11:00 AM
At: inthepauseofagesturetheremightbeanecho.eu

The three-day symposium In the pause of a gesture there might be an echo, which was due to take place at puntWG from May 1 to May 3, 2020, would have examined artistic affiliations with heritage in a European context through a lively exchange of all kinds of understandings, perceptions, and experiences.

Now that the symposium has become an online platform, there is a more fluid time frame. Without a clear trajectory, living up to the event's title, the exhibition's organizers entered a pause in time.

Participating artists: Alena Alexandrova, Nataša Bodrožić, Jeroen Boomgaard, Yane Calovski, Doplgenger, Marjoca de Greef, Rumiko Hagiwara, Hristina Ivanoska, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Aram Lee, Luiza Margan, Anastasija Pandilovska, Antonis Pittas, Richtje Reinsma and Ivana Vaseva
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A note from the organisers: 
The main objective of the platform is to explore how artistic practices coalesce and affiliate with cultural heritage. The main feature of the platform is interconnection and cooperation.

Parallel to the individual presentations and performances, participants started one-on-one conversations and artistic collaborations by means of online and distanced communication. At this moment in time, we can dawdle and dedicate time and effort to see if these relationships between participants and between their presentations can be developed.

The transformed symposium developed into a collection of multi-formed presentations by artists, writers, curators and researchers whose practices address topics such as “heritage activism”, “objects in the dark”, “collective memory”, “photographic ruins”,  “forgotten histories”, “critical nostalgia”, and the “dimensions of time and space”. 
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The symposium In the pause of a gesture there might be an echo is organized by Suns and Stars and curated by Anastasija Pandilovska and Marjoca de Greef.

For more info please contact: info@sunsandstars.nl

In line with other event and gallery spaces, due attempts to halt the spread of Covid-19, puntWG will be closed until the beginning of April 2020. 

This is the final presentation of the current airWG resident Miku Sato.

Girls Got Golds  is a video about the medalists of Amsterdam Olympics in 1928. In response to Tokyo Olympics 2020, the past Olympic games, especially the Netherlands' women's national gymnastics team, was researched by the artist. The video retells the stories and memories of the girls and also features a survivor of WWII. 

This practice tries to revive incidents and people that are concealed by history; the ones that are not properly recorded or heard by society in different circumstances, and finds the artist drawing her own suggestive line between the past and present.

About the Artist

Miku Satoʼs practice is based on her fieldwork of specific places, where she starts up a project delegating her intention to the local people she selects. Through video, installation and peopleʼs participatory action, she explores new perspectives and alternative possibility of relationship between individuals and the world as well as passivity and proactivity in society. Her quest is to compose her own new narratives to retell the past and present together under a different light.

Photos by Ilya Rabinovich

In line with other event and gallery spaces, due attempts to halt the spread of Covid-19, puntWG will be closed until the beginning of April 2020. 

Bernadette Beunk & Anna Rudolf present their most recent work in a joint exhbition. About the  exhbition, Bernadette says: "I invited Anna for this dual show because her work is consistent in every respect. It is both forceful and sensitive. Her approach is bold and her images are not meant to be merely pleasing."

Bernadette’s musical, colourful drawings are in contrast to Anna Rudolf’s expressive black and white charcoal gestures. Together the works raise meaningful questions. On a closer look, is the world depicted in Beunk’s abstract drawings as abstract as it seems? And vice versa: are Rudolf’s figurative images as figurative as they seem?

What connects the work of these two artists is that they consider "the line" an autonomous starting point. In Rudolf’s drawings, the line is pulled outward into all directions by seemingly unexpected forces, releasing image and gesture from what might restrain them. In her (liberating?) search for expansion, human and animal shapes emerge (do they?). In Beunk’s drawings, the dancing line reflects how our temporal existence is notated by her creator. The score, though consistent, allows for any variation necessary. For both artists the resulting images are the surprising but logical outcome of the drawing process. For Anna Rudolf, the lines in her drawings are words. Bernadette Beunk on the other hand, considers her lines as an extension of herself. For both artists, lines reflect an inner life that interacts with life and the world "out there."

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

Additional Opening Times:
Friday 21 Feb, 14:00 -18:00
Friday 28 Feb, 14:00 - 18:00
Friday 06 Mar, 14:00 - 18:00

     So when you turn your wrist to grab your cup of coffee, the camera rotates to the same angle? Well, from the point of view of your smartwatch, that is?

      It is in fact a gimbal camera stabiliser that is interpreting a script of motion coordinates of the smartwatch, setting the camera in motion rather than reducing camera shake. In a way, the logic of the system is reversed and used against itself.

     [the artist rubs the back of his neck]

As we go about our daily lives, we leave behind virtual breadcrumbs—digital records of the people we call, the places we go, the things we eat and the products we buy. These breadcrumbs tell a more accurate story of our lives than anything we choose to reveal about ourselves.…Digital breadcrumbs…record our behavior as it actually happened. – Alex Pentland

     The data doesn’t say much about who you really are, nor shows anything essential about your family?

     By recording my own raw sensor values and filtering these for recurring patterns, I realised that I often repeat certain movements, a sort of tics. From a vast amount of data, I managed to isolate the values corresponding to these subconscious movements, generating a kind of model. You could call the resulting camera trajectory a portrait. It is an abstraction, a portrait based on the movements of my wrist.

     [the artist rubs the back of his neck]

They claim the data from our private experience and take the profit. Illegitimate profit. Because they took it at the beginning without our knowledge. Bypassing our awareness. – Shoshana Zuboff

Vincent Vulsma (1982) investigates the embodiment of power structures, such as extraction, appropriation, and distribution, within all kinds of commodities. A common thread in his work is the retracing of ongoing colonial structures within contemporary production processes, which runs from in-depth research, to the artistic appropriation of cultural heritage, like an African mask or a 19th century Kuba textile, to the production and trade of natural indigo pigment. In the exhibition ‘Breadcrumbs’ the main point of departure is the appropriation of our private domain by means of (wearable) sensor-technology.

This project is supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Mondriaan Fund.

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

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.

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.

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