Posts tagged residency
Resident Dimitar Genchev shows works at gallery Gerhard Hofland
Dimitar Genchev (Bg/1985) is currently exhibiting Nostalgia at gallery Gerhard Hofland until May 25. The show has several works inspired by Genchev’s home country Bulgaria. The large paintings are often edited with multiple layers of paint in dreamy colors. Justin Hahury asks Genchev about his exhibition.
Your new exhibition at gallery Gerhard Hofland is called Nostalgia. Can you explain why?
For the exhibition I came across some words that my work might embody. Words such as depth, insight or nostalgia would represent my work. I came to the final conclusion, together with the gallery, that Nostalgia fits very well. It describes the feeling I have starting each new work.
The Lizzard Lounge in Zimbabwe
Rijksakademie resident Admire Kamudzengerere (ZW/1981) travels together with residents Aditya Mandayam (IN/1983) and Kate Levant (US/1983) to Zimbabwe. The three artists will attend the opening of the Harare International Arts Festival (HIFA), taking place from April 30 – May 6. During their stay they will make a lounge in the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, called the Lizzard Lounge. Justin Hahury asks Kamudzengerere about their stay.
What are you going to do during your stay at the Lizard Lounge in Zimbabwe?
During the mini-residency in Zimbabwe Aditya, Kate and I do performances and show video installations in our own set up Lizzard Lounge in the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Besides, there will be presentations and discussions on the importance of art. Artists and people from different countries and backgrounds will meet and discuss, and raise issues together. The idea of this project came up during our stay at the Rijksakademie. It is based upon discussions between me, Aditya and Kate. The opening of the festival takes place on Queensday April 30. It is our contribution to this festive day of the Netherlands. Therefore, the ambassador of the Netherlands in Zimbabwe comes specially to open the event.
Highly liquid, forever frozen
Magali Reus in Fons Welters Gallery
Rijksakademie resident Magali Reus presents her work in the solo exhibition ‘Highly Liquid’ in gallery Fons Welters in Amsterdam. On view until April 20.
For some reason the title spontaneously made me think of ‘Panta Rhei’. That is a concept in the philosophy of Heraklitus, a Greek thinker that lived in the fifth century before Christ. It means that ‘everything flows’ and refers to the always changing nature of things. For me Panta Rhei always pointed to the future. When I learned about it in high school I visualised a river that ran towards a waterfall, a sea, another larger river… Just something nice. It never made me think of where the water came from and how it ended up in the river. It didn’t really matter because everything flows anyway. In a way my experience of the story that ‘Highly Liquid’ tells, or actually doesn’t tell, worked vice versa.
Are we to mark this day with a white or a black stone?
Fernando Sánchez Castillo – El sueño de la razón / De slaap van de rede
A film screen shows four men in the kind of blue shirts that to me signify slightly outdated army wear, with in the background a fighter-plane from the 1950s. In their hands small stones with which they make all kinds of sounds and rhythms and in front of them a man in suit that’s actually conducting. It all looks a bit foolish, but it turns out to be a very serious and very modern form of music, performed by professional Peruvian military musicians, for which a way of transcribing to music score has even been developed.
Rijksakademie visits MAVA in Benin
The RAIN Artists’ Initiatives Network is a worldwide platform interconnecting artists’ initiatives that have been set up by alumni in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The network, emanating from the Rijksakademie in the late nineties, works on behalf of mutual exchanges within a global perspective and stimulates an active dialogue on ideas, information, art, artists and cultural references.
One of the latest residencies is an initiative of former resident Meschac Gaba (RA 96/97) in Benin. He foundedMusée de l’Art de la Vie Active / Active Art Museum of Life (MAVA) in the city Cotonou in Benin in 2010. In 2013 the association was officially opened with the aim to contribute to the art development and art education in Benin. During the opening the first residency took place, with different international artists. From the Rijksakademie resident artist Éric Giraudet de Boudemange (FR), alumnus Thomas Raat (RA 11/12) and Rijksakademie-advisor Hermann Pitz joined the first project and, attended the opening. During their 3 weeks stay in Cotonou Giraudet de Boudemange and Raat worked on several artworks for the opening event. Other artists involved in the first residency were Meschac Gaba, Komla Eza (Togo), Laudamus Segbo (Benin), and Christelle Yaovi (Benin). Justin Hahury interviews Giraudet de Boudemange about his experiences.
The changing of the guard at the Rijksakademie.
After the intense and successful RijksakademieOPEN in December, a period of transition takes place here at the Rijksakademie. A lot of former residents have already left the premises after their residency has come to an end, leaving their studio clean and vacant. Seeing the empty, freshly white painted studios is almost like they are waiting for the new residents to take over. At the end of January the new residents will arrive here at the former cavelry barracks, and we are very much looking forward to their arrival. Soon we will introduce the new residents artists on this blog. In the meantime, enjoy a short interview with ex-resident Thomas Raat about his (former) studio and leaving the Rijksakademie.
Mister Motley portretteert Dimitar Genchev
Dimitar Genchev is gefascineerd door het doodgewone. De tafelpoot en de facebookfoto. In zijn schilderijen krijgt het strijkijzer net zoveel aandacht als de vrouw in de jurk; de asbak op tafel is van even groot belang als de twijfelende blik in de ogen. Genchev laat mij een gedetailleerd portret zien van een cd speler.
Lees de rest van het artikel hier.
Mister Motley portretteert Uche Okpa-Iroha
Mister Motley heeft een RijksakademieOPEN blog geopend in aanloop naar RijksakademieOPEN. Mister Motley portretteert deze maand alvast een selectie kunstenaars die op 1 en 2 december hun werk zullen presenteren.
Nat van de regen rijkt mijn hand druipende naar de bel aan het ijzeren hek dat de Rijksakademie omringt. Een lange donkere man snelt mijn kant op met zijn hand in de lucht. Geen jas, enkel een wapperende trui en een sjaal omhullen zijn lange tengere lijf. Glimlachend houdt hij een zoemer omhoog. Hij laat mij naar binnen.
Lees de rest van het artikel hier
Mister Motley portretteert Maryanto
Mister Motley heeft een RijksakademieOPEN blog geopend in aanloop naar RijksakademieOPEN. Mister Motley portretteert deze maand alvast een selectie kunstenaars die op 1 en 2 december hun werk zullen presenteren.
Maryanto is een verhalenverteller. In zijn kunst kiest hij dan ook voor de middenweg tussen stripboek en een autonoom kunstwerk. Zijn werk gaat over het gat tussen arm en rijk, waarbij thema’s als vervuiling, honger, revolutie, militaire intimidatie en corruptie zeker niet ontweken worden.
Lees de rest van het artikel hier
Mister Motley portretteert Daniëlle van Ark
Mister Motley heeft een RijksakademieOPEN blog geopend in aanloop naar RijksakademieOPEN.Mister Motley portretteert deze maand alvast een selectie kunstenaars die op 1 en 2 december hun werk zullen presenteren.
Danielle van Ark
vader: elektricien / moeder: huisvrouw
Wie zijn hoofd koel wil houden in de kunstwereld kan maar beter quotes verzamelen, graven fotograferen, vlinders stelen van Damien Hirst en wereldwijd de depots afreizen van natuurhistorische musea. Voor Daniëlle van Ark werkt het, meestal. Toen zij enkele maanden geleden vastliep deed zij een wilde greep in haar verzameling zelfhulpboeken voor kunstenaars die zij ooit vanuit een humoristische fascinatie was begonnen. Boeken met titels als: Art & Fear, Trust the Process en Staying Sane in the Arts.
Lees de rest van het artikel hier.
Daniëlle van Ark finds a home in Museum Van Loon
Daniëlle van Ark, Untitled, 2011.
Maybe you have noticed them in Amsterdam, the billboards with a pair of wrinkly hands photographed against a black background, which are advertisements for the Foam exhibition in Van Loon. The hands are part of Everything fell into the right hands, a series of works that Rijksakademie resident Daniëlle van Ark started in 2009 and has recently finished. The exhibition shows a cross section of her work amidst a lush, interior, at a moment that is crucial in her career as an artist.
Internal open studios at the Rijksakademie
Twice a year, the resident artists at the Rijksakademie open up their studios for each other, advisors and employees during the internal open studios. Ideas for projects are being tested and work is discussed with fellow residents and advisors. The artists will present the outcome to the public during RijksakademieOPEN, December 1 and 2.
Korean resident Min Oh showed a minimalistic, well thought-out performance called The Suite while an alternative version of the same performance was projected on the wall.
Min Oh, The Suite, 2012 Video and object-installation: Min Oh. Performance: Lisa Vereertbrugghen (alternate version for the Rijksakademie internal open studios)
What made the performance alienating was the contrast between the digital projection on the screen and the analogue, physical happening on stage. A female model was struggling through various wooden sculptures in absence of a soundtrack, while the sound from the clicking of high heels from the projection interfered with the actual sound from the live performance. Oh started the internal open studios leaving the spectators warm and fuzzy, but at the same time cold and estranged to begin a day of new impressions and experiences.
ILLEGITIMATE BUSINESS
During the weekend ‘Unseen’ and ‘Amsterdam Drawing 2012’, two large art fairs open in Amsterdam, Rijksakademie artist and resident Pawel Kruk shows with ILLEGITIMATE BUSINESS that art works can be purchased outside the framework of the art market as well. Kruk curated an exhibition of illegitimately obtained artworks at Magazijn, a living room project space by Gijs Stork. Instead of a formal text with the artwork’s title, year and price, the works are presented here with confessions of the owners. None of them paid money for the artworks, the value of these objects however is expressed in the personal stories of their (anonymous) collectors.
On the ceiling of Magazijn a film of a zeppelin by Yael Bartana is projected. Since the movie was the gallery director’s least favourite Bartana work, she had hidden the work in the gallery basement. The gallery assistant, who was later fired for an obscure reason, took the work home and gave it to the current owner.
Yael Bartana
*PRESENT FOREVER
Present Forever is a remarkable exhibition on a remarkable location. 55 artists were invited to make work for FATFORM in their new residence, a parking garage in the Bijlmer inAmsterdam, right across the road from where they were seated in the past two summers, the Kraaiennest. Lees spacious but still big, 3500m2 or two full circles of concrete.
The organisers (for reference they are Ad de Jong and Manuel Klappe, who
also organised BeeldHalWerk in Noord in 2010, in cooperation with Daniela
Bershan, artist and one of the founders of Fatform and Bas Oudt, exhibition
designer) hand-picked 55 artists and invited them to make new work if their
time allowed and over half of them did. Their selection gives an accurate
cross section of the current state of the art. Ranging from young artists
to established heroes, a good dozen of the Rijksakademie alumni and a
current Rijksakademie student, Bert Jacobs, whom I also asked about his
work for the expo.
Did you make work especially for the exhibition?
At this moment my work focuses primarily on experimenting with abstraction
and figuration, with color and the skin of the canvas. Recently this
resulted in a search for a way to thicken/enlarge the physical spaciousness
and presence of the canvas by throwing it out of the framework. PRESENT
FOREVER, taking the future and a strong physical presence as the basis,
came with the ‘assignment’ to take a risk and to radically focus on the
core of one’s own artistic practice and think about what could be the
direction for the next ten years; making a daring ‘future’ work out of
that. In that sense my own practice and the idea of this exhibition came
together, hoping that the work itself could get an extra dimension because
of the space it would lean in.
How does your work relate to the theme “present” - and future?
It’s not a thematic exhibition and as such it is not necessarily a relation
with present as a theme, but being present and how to be present.
What is your vision for the future?
Searching, developing and changing my practice
What is special about this exposition?
I already knew and worked with the FATFORM crew and seeing all the hard
work and the progress they made in the last three years resulting now in
this big exhibition PRESENT FOREVER and a great festival day with a lot of
different performances and all kinds of music, food and lots of visitors
was nice. Next to that FATFORM has created space for a music studio, a
dance studio a taekwondo gym and more spontaneous interludes with music,
talks, smaller exhibitions and food over the last couple of months. Because
of this mixture of forms and people it is great to be part of this
initiative by participating in this show.
Is the ‘Bijlmer’(The Bijlmermeer, or colloquially Bijlmer, is one of the neighbourhoods that form theAmsterdam Zuidoost (‘Amsterdam South-East’) borough (or “stadsdeel”) of A”sterd’, Netherlands a good place for an artist to be? I think the Bijlmer can be a good place to be and I believe every place can
be interesting for everyone, also for an artist. In the years that I had my
studio in the Bijlmer it was not only the studio or the place that I liked
rather it were the people that I met in the years working there. This is
how I got connected with people working and/or living there and that’s what
makes the Bijlmer and FATFORM for me a nice place to be. Quite specific is that FATFORM also attracts people from the
neighborhood liking the place, helping out and setting up for example a
music studio. I think it’s important that a big group of people can be
involved in a project such as this and all in their own way contribute to
the FATFORM project or the other way around.
All the work forms one exhibition and the central theme is discussed among
the works: where are we and where do we go from here? Another binding
factor is that they are all handmade. No photography, no video, no new
media. New forms, crafted by hand, present in their physicality. It suits
the place. We are in a parking garage in the Bijlmer, which could be a very
framed location. Still the viewer walks in and out of the garage during the
exhibition: sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t. Some works underline
the space and work with it, like a Jaguar spinning upside down or a shelter
hanging from the ceiling. Some works deny or ignore the space altogether,
and some transform it - into a gallery, a cave, a different space, a
non-space, a private universe. Many of the works will only be shown here -
so go, visit!
(the exhibition can still be visited until September 30th)
http://fatform.com/projects/present-forever/
http://www.rijksakademie.nl/NL/resident/bert-jacobs
By Karina Palosi
The Workshop Series: Paint Laboratory
The Rijksakademie has a high level of expertise on the use of different materials and instruments in the fields of image and sound, graphics, construction and chemicals. This expertise is made available to resident artists in six different workshops, and technical experts in all different fields are available for advice. In professionally-equipped workshops, residents work and experiment with traditional and contemporary materials and techniques. In the Workshop series we explore what is going on in the technical workshops one area of expertise at the time.
PAINT LABORATORY
At the paint laboratory experiment and research are encouraged. “Every year we are (re-) inventing,” says technical supervisor Arend Nijkamp. It often takes a few attempts to visualize the idea of the artists. The paintlab inspires a new generation of residents every year. A table full of tests and prototypes illustrates this and shows what can go wrong, but moreover it shows everything that is possible. The emphasis is on contemporary applications such as the development of surface structures, synthetic resins, conservation methods and industrial paints and coatings. The paint laboratory collaborates often with other workshops, like ceramics for 3D objects, or with video when it comes to projecting on a special surface.
Currently resident Roderick Hietbrink is a perfect example of this collaboration between workshops in the Rijksakademie. For his project ‘masks’ (working title, the project/performance is still in progress) he is making costumes involving handcrafted bird masks. I meet him in his studio where he is busy papier-mâché-ing the ‘skulls/skeleton’ of these masks and ask him a few questions.
Which workshops did you use for your work?
I used practically every workshop in the Rijksakademie for my projects, and I learned many new techniques and worked with a lot of different materials. This time it was no different, for this project I worked in the wood workshop, the ceramics department and the paint laboratory. after the masks are finished and I am going to make an installation/performance/video work for which I will probably need the electronics department also.
I noticed in your other work you also make a lot of props yourself, why is that?
It’s important to me to maintain a close communication between my ideas and the production process, because many ideas are actually derived from it. However this particular project is very labour intensive, so I had to find an assistant to come and help me out.
The bird mask that is the closest to being finished is the woodcock. It has real feathers precisely glued to the mask and stares at you with huge brown plastic doll-like eyes. The eyes Roderick made in himself in several Rijksakademie workshops. In the ceramics department and the paint laboratory the lens was constructed and the mold for the shape of the lens was constructed in the metal workshop.
What inspired you to start making these masks?
First of all, it is not my goal to make masks just for making masks, I am making them for a performance or video I will use them for later. Inspiration I drew mostly from my former projects (Harlequin, The Living Room). Furthermore, from an early age I have been fascinated by birds and I dream about flying a lot, so in a way I feel like a bird sometimes.
So you mean you’re not sure where you are going to use the masks for, there is no predetermined strategy?
Exactly, it is still uncertain where I am going with it, the idea will (hopefully) develop along the way. For now I have an idea in my head of what I want the bird masks to look like and that is what I am concentrating on.
Do you always work this way, without a clear plan?
It depends, for my work The Living Room, where an oak gets dragged through a living room, I had to plan every detail, with this project I did not plan like that at all, I will find out what I exactly want with it along the way, it is a process.
The birds Roderick is concentrating on are not fantasy birds but the ones you could find in your everyday life, like a collared dove, a sea gull, and a heron. The wall of his studio is plastered with pictures of these birds.
The birds you are using as an example are quite the average bird, did you choose them on purpose?
As a matter of fact, yes. I was looking for birds without many allegorical or symbolic connotations. Birds that are somewhat still ‘available’ to give meaning to. The birds seem ordinary but in my work will become real characters.
So in the end it could be that, after I have seen your finished work, you have managed to give meaning/personality to an ordinary bird I encounter every day in Amsterdam?
Yes.
When do you expect the project to be finished?
I want to show the result during the RijksakademieOPEN 2012, the first weekend of December.
——————
For more info about Roderick and his work visit his artist page
For more info about RijksakademieOPEN visit our website
By DS
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