Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh represented the Netherlands at the 57^th Venice Biennale. The Dutch Pavilion exhibition presented an architectonic site-specific installation featuring artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s filmic engagement with (actively) forgotten aspects of modern Dutch history that resonate with current transformations in Dutch society. Van Oldenborgh and Cotter’s Cinema Olanda project was conceived for the occasion and was unanimously chosen by the jury, following a shortlist from a national call for proposals.

The Cinema Olanda project embraced the occasion of national representation as an opportunity to reflect on the Netherlands’ (inter)national image vis-à-vis the current rapid transformations in Dutch society. In addition to the solo exhibition of work by Van Oldenborgh in Venice, it featured a major group exhibition and six-week event program entitled Cinema Olanda: Platform at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, conceived to bring the questions underlying the Venice exhibition home to the Netherlands. Additional events took place at the Stedelijk Museum, EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam Public Library, among other venues in the Netherlands.

Van Oldenborgh uses film as a medium and form of social production, and her oeuvre revolves around bringing contemporary situations and under-examined events from recent history together in unexpected constellations. Van Oldenborgh creates her work through live (public) film shoots, set in ideologically charged architectural location, in which script is generated collectively by polyphonic conversations between individuals with a personal or professional relationship to the work’s lines of enquiry. Working in a range of cultural contexts, her films aim at a critical understanding and potential transformation of conditions for cultural production at this present moment. 

The exhibition in the Dutch Pavilion took its conceptual departure point from Gerrit Rietveld’s pavilion design as a Modernist projection of The Netherlands, reconsidering what lies beyond its aesthetic and ideological frame, both at the time of its design in 1953 and in the present. Designed during the Postwar Reconstruction, when architecture was key to forging a new national image, the pavilion projects a progressive image of openness and transparency.

On entering the pavilion, the exhibition viewer was confronted by a site-specific architectural installation, which both housed and aesthetically resounded with Van Oldenborgh’s three new ‘films’. These works revealed an alternative narrative to the Netherlands’ self-image as a tolerant nation, namely its reality in the present day as a complex and rapidly transforming social, cultural and political space. :

WORKS:

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Cinema Olanda (2017, 15´), a major new film conceived for the biennale, seeks out alternative voices behind Dutch postwar society. Shot in one uncut take in urban planner Lotte Stam-Beese’s acclaimed Pendrecht district in Rotterdam, it attempts to connect contemporary and past events, and individuals like revolutionary intellectual Otto Huiswoud, through a momentary filmic reality. 

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Prologue: Squat-Anti-Squat (2016, 2 x 17´), a two-part film, engages with architect Aldo van Eyck’s recently squatted Tripolis building in Amsterdam and a 1970’s Dutch-Caribbean squatting action, evoking transforming conceptions of solidarity. 

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Footnotes to Cinema Olanda #1 and #3 (2017), large-scale lenticular images of the film’s production, offer a condensed filmic experience, activating the viewer’s body in space. 

PUBLIC PROGRAM

The exhibition in Venice was accompanied by a live event in the pavilion on 23 June 2017 with contributions by invited guests, author Avery Gordon, art theorist Sarat Maharaj, and anthropologist Gloria Wekker. 

A parallel program featuring an extensive exhibition and 10-week live program will take place in the Netherlands at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, the Stedelijk Museum, EYE Film Museum, The Black Archives, Amsterdam Public Library, The University of Amsterdam, among other venues. [See Cinema Olanda: Platform link below for details.)

PUBLICATIONS

The exhibition catalogue, Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter (Hatje Cantz /Mondriaan Fund, 2017) features visual documentation of the installation and films as well as a series of commissioned essays by leading writers in the fields of art, film, architecture, social anthropology and critical race studies.

A special supplement of the Dutch news magazine De Groene Amsterdammer on Cinema Olanda coincided with the exhibition opening, in keeping with the artist's and curator's wish to extend the exhibition’s underlying questions to a wider Dutch public.

PARTNERS

Cinema Olanda was commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund, a publicly financed foundation for visual arts and cultural heritage. The project was additionally partnered by Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, Akademie van Kunsten/Society of Arts, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, Nuova Icona, Venice and the City of Rotterdam.