TENT. Rotterdam

o9.o7 – 24.o8.2oo8

Imagine being lost in transit, stuck in an odd place together with a guy named Barry. He’s more of the silent type but once he gets going, it’s hard to stop her. She will speak about the future, the past and the place she is from, in ways which aren’t that easy to comprehend. She talks in images, allusions and ciphers. Sometimes she gesticulates so intensely that her gestures seem like they are part of a ballet of sorts. Conversing with Barry becomes like performing some kind of choreography together. After a while there are moments when you feel you catch his drift and get his jokes. Was he even joking? With Barry it’s difficult to tell. But there are some things you have in common: you both love Hitchcock and you’d do anything to leave this place behind. So you go, you travel with Barry to magical and mysterious places. Other times you just go for coffee or a walk in the park. The exact nature of your travels is difficult to describe. You might say, they feel a bit like two years at an art school and one exhibition.

The exhibition My Travels with Barry was conceived in collaboration with Bernd Krauss and Jan Verwoert, tutors at Piet Zwart Institute.

Mirjana Boba Stojadinovic (Serbia)
Mirjana Boba Stojadinovic was born in Yugoslavia. Mirjana Boba Stojadinovic was born in Serbia. She was born in a country where the pro-visionality of space is well understood. Her recent work explores how memories of the place we are from can inform our understanding of the space we travel to, and asks in what ways these memories can be shared.

Gunndis Yr Finnbogadottir (Iceland)
How memory inscribes our understanding of space is also a central concern of GunndÍs Yr FinnbogadÓttir. Here the gallery is used as a site for the re-inscription of a domestic space (her mother-in-law’s kitchen) and a workspace (her studio). Both are sites for particular types of production and yet both seem to overlap. The audience becomes party to a new game of inscription that mixes their own imagined spaces with the memories and experiences of the artist.

Jacqueline Forzelius (Sweden)
Jacqueline Forzelius has opened an agency, it’s trying its best to provide a service. We know it has something to do with communication – information is imparted earnestly, the efficiency of work endorsed (if not demonstrated). Just as we begin to lose faith in this service we realize we have somehow become participants. So, we are left to wonder, what hidden persuader is operating behind the scenes?

Terje Øverås (Norway)
A question mark describes a decapitated snake descending. Terje Øverås has produced a text, something between a novel and a prose poem: a cloud of fragments around a point of gravity, a ‘Pataphysical journey charted with an Oulipian map. He has also created various opportunities and contexts in which the text can be read.

Margo Onnes (Netherlands)
A look-alike of 1960s TV heroine Emma Peel wanders through the set of Margo Onnes’ video piece ‘Nola Dee and the Ongoing Invasion of the Rats’. But it seems as if our heroine’s nemesis has tampered with the machinery so that the individual shots are randomly reshuffled. Worlds fold into each other, time cycles and characters shift.

Sjoerd Westbroek (Netherlands)
Recently Sjoerd Westbroek has been drawing, whether ‘free-hand’ or with a large array of drawing devices. Westbroek has been exploring the paradox at the heart of drawing: at the very moment something is depicted in an image, that thing disappears behind the opaque surface of the drawing – this is how the thing is hidden behind its own appearance. This paradox, this game of cat and mouse between experience and representation, becomes more pertinent when an image is projected. What form of presence, Westbroek seems to ask, is preserved when the image simply hangs in light?

Edward Thomson (UK)
Edward Clydesdale Thomson’s recent work has been concerned with the different ways visual stages are constructed. He has researched a variety of sites – including zoos, ornamental gardens, peep shows and various architectural tableaus – and has investigated the logic each employs to direct the viewer’s attention or to confirm the viewer’s preconception of what they might expect to see. At times the camera is an appropriate tool to investigate how these spaces perform, or how these technologies of observation are constructed, at other times their subtle machinery unfolds in speech or text which allows Clydesdale Thomson to occupy his own particular space within the systems he explores.

Inger Alfnes (Norway)
Inger Alfnes: The blade of a saw sticks out of a remote frozen lake. The sun reflects off the blade and the object seems to take on a form approaching human. It seems to be looking at us, we are captured in its gaze. We get a similar uncanny feeling when we see a photograph of a farmer’s house; the red light might be inviting but there is something darker beneath the familiarity, something uncanny, something ‘unheimlich’, something unknown at the heart of what we know. In Alfnes’ work things are often disguised, camouflaged, rendered self-similar to their surroundings; sometimes a dark spirit hides behind a mask of formal beauty and the viewer is left asking what their own relation to these strange creatures might be.

Egle Budvytyte (Lithuania)
Fact: In Rotterdam we are never more than 500 meters from a fish. Egle Budvytyte has discovered that fish emit and receive messages that human beings can decipher – their signals swim through the air at a previously unde-tectable frequency – radiating out in perfect circles like the rings on a pond disturbed by a falling stone. They form nodes that relay information across the divide between water and land and across the border between animal and human.

Maja Bekan (Serbia)
Maja Bekan‘s recent artwork spans the recent history of work and leisure. In industrial society workers were allocated leisure time, they chased across the continent in affordable cars in pursuit of the sun. Today, work-outs and tanning machines make it possible to understand leisure as work. In Bekan’s installation we see this curious conflation of the social space as workplace, as the space of the tanning machine and the classic summer holiday meet in a seductive technological narration.

Esther de Vlam (Netherlands)
Esther de Vlam is interested in how we begin to make something from the bare minimum. How do we depart from zero? She investigates how the threshold of normality is crossed and a new position is maintained; how a crisis (a war or poverty, for instance) becomes normality, even taken for granted. Her work takes the form of interventions and installations where everyday objects undergo a transformation.

Gerwin Luijendijk (Netherlands)
For Gerwin Luijendijk the video, the performance and the sculpture are indivisible. He systematically explores the various properties of the home, the studio, or ‘nature’. Although his work concerns itself with various formal elements that allude to familiar modernistic tropes, it also very quickly moves out into an everyday world that is all too familiar to us.

Esme Valk (Netherlands)
Esmé Valk’s recent work has been preoccupied with social choreography, the study of behavior and interrelations between social and non-social agents. This study has led Valk to conclude that she herself, as the observer, cannot be outside the thing she observes – so her task became to find a methodology that reflects this reality. Her work reveals both the particularities within the system and the patterns that emerge from the interaction of many particulars.

Text: Steve Rushton and Jan Verwoert