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Curating

Cinema Olanda Platform

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

17 June – 20 August 2017

Cinema Olanda Platform was a group exhibition and six-week live program that formed an adaptable platform for artists, filmmakers, activists and academics that attend to the neglected cultural histories of diverse peoples living in the Netherlands. It was conceived to bring “home” the questions raised in the solo exhibition of Wendelien van Oldenborgh at the Dutch Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017.

Conceived and curated by Lucy Cotter with artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh and produced with the support of the Witte de With team (Defne Ayas, Director/ Natasha Hoare, Curator) and invited guests.

Four films by Van Oldenborgh addressing Dutch postcolonial questions were installed in an exhibition scenography designed to adapt to the needs of changing exhibitions elements, performances and events by invited group and individuals, which formed a six-week live event program. These invited guests were:

Quinsy Gario (Artist, Poet), Charl Landvreugd (Artist, Curator, Writer), Patricia Pisters and Esther Peeren (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam); New Urban Collective (Jessica de Abreu, Mitchell Esajas), and First Things First (Katayoun Arian, Louise Autar, Max de Ploeg).

Opening Weekend (16th – 18th June)

Talks, Performances, and Screening of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s Prologue: Squat / Anti-Squat (2016). Panel Discussion, Conditions for Criticality, moderated and with an introduction by Lucy Cotter.

Week 1 (19th – 25th June)

The Black Archives on Tour: Hidden Stories of Black Resistance in the Netherlands, by New Urban Collective (Jessica de Abreu, Mitchell Esajas). Live archiving of major new acquisition and two live events with additional guests.

Week 2 (26th June – 2nd July)

Live broadcasting of two new editions of talk show Roet in het Eten, by Quinsy Gario (Artist, Poet) with invited guests.

Week 3 (3rd – 9th July)

Film program Black Film Matters, by Patricia Pisters and Esther Peeren, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, with screening and talk with Tessa Boerman (Film Director) and screening/spoken word/lecture examining the legacy of writer/artist Edgar Cairo.

Week 4 (10th – 16th July)

Decolonial Options; Imagining the futurity of decolonial practice with the University of Colour, by The University of Colour (Katayoun Arian, Louise Autar, Max de Ploeg) with contributions from invited guests and performance and talk with artist Grada Kilomba. 

Week 5 (17th – 23rd July)

“Holland Mijn Mars”, Charl Landvreugd: performance and installation.

Curating

Lucy Cotter holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. In her writing and curatorial projects, she approaches the exhibition space as a unique site for embodied-material-spatial knowledge-making, multi-sensory access, and cultural decolonization.

Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, with Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh, a solo exhibition in Venice comprising of an architectonic installation with new film works, engaging with tensions between the national image and suppressed histories. Cinema Olanda: Platform, a major group exhibition and event program at Kunstinstitut Melly, the Stedelijk Museum, and EYE Film Museum which brought these questions home to the Netherlands.

Cotter was Curator in Residence at Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR from 2021–22, curating the year-long program Turnstones (2022-3). Other recent presentations include Undoing Langauge: Early Performance by Brian O' Doherty at The Kitchen, New York (2021), and The Unknown Artist (2019) at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. She is currently curating the year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire (2024–5) as project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland, with additional events at venues across the US, including e-flux, New York; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans.

Her earlier projects include being co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, 2006–2008, a transnational artistic research project in six cities worldwide that explored possibilities for a more culturally responsive art discourse. She organized numerous exhibitions engaging with artistic research as head of the MA Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 2010-2015. Cotter has worked in various capacities at museums and galleries in Germany (Ludwigs Forum for Contemporary Art) and Italy (Peggy Guggenheim Museum and Nuova Icona Institute) and from 2003-4 was co-director of Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam.

Curatorial, Selected

SAMPLE CATALOGUES

How close is curatorial practice to the affinities and sensibilities of artists? Does curating seek to hold knowledge differently; does it work from art’s embodied material-conceptual processes? Does it swim in the direction of the unknown? Is it committed to fluidity, to play, and to serious reimagining? What are the continuities and discontinuities between artistic practice, academic inquiry, and curatorial practice? Does it embrace the exhibition’s potential to hold space for (neurodiverse, anti-ableist, anti-racist, gender-exploratory) forms of intelligence?