• Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
• Stroom Center for Art & Architecture, The Hague
• Walden Affairs, The Hague
• W139 gallery, Amsterdam
• A-Pass, Advanced Performance, Brussels
• 1646 Project Space, The Hague
• Gemak, The Hague
• The Royal College of Art, London
• BAK (Basis for Art, Theory and Social Action), Utrecht
• De Appel, Amsterdam
• Villa K, The Hague
• Kunstvlaai Independent Art Fair, Amsterdam
• Studio Loos, The Hague
• Quartair, The Hague

Gemak, The Hague
5 June 2015 – 4 July 2015
Group exhibition with performance program

A house has several spaces and rooms to which different levels of privacy apply. The entrance hall is the most public. The bedroom, bathroom and toilet can be considered as the most private areas and the living room and dining room as more public spaces.For this occasion the exhibition space GEMAK will be considered as a house with nine ‘fluid’ corridors and rooms. It will function as a home for their work. In the exhibition the individual quality of each artist will be related to the specific characteristics of these ‘rooms’. The work of the artists shows different ways of relating to private and public issues. Some works are exuberant and challenging, while other works are more contemplative, quiet and intimate… like the rooms in a house.

In six of the nine rooms the participating artists will show their work in small ‘private’ presentations, and in other spaces meetings and dialogues will take place. Like in a real house there is constant activity and therefore the show is an exhibition in motion and a research in progress.

Participating artists:
Natasha Taylor, Fela Kim, HyunTae Lee, Ana Guedes, mamoru and Matthijs Walhout

Guest curator:
Luuk Wilmering

Works:

• Natasha Taylor, What happens when you shift special contexts, 2015 (installation)  |   “The term wrestling can be used in it’s literal and it’s metaphorical sense, both have my interest. I want to play within these realms.”
• Fela Kim, installation, untitled, 2015  |  Fela Kim’s work is an investigation into social structures. She is intrigued by human relations, how they emerge, what they mean and how these connections operate and influence people.
• HyunTae Lee, Preparing preparation, 2015 (installation)  |  HyunTae Lee used to think about spending time spending time; reacting to his situations, or spending time with the situations he happened to be situated within, he is thinking. He thinks he is thinking while thinking about the difference between acting and reacting.
• Ana Guedes, Threnody #01, 2015 (video) & On transience, work in progress 2015(installation)  Ana Guedes is a multidisciplinary artist, who is developing a sound oriented practice focused on the awareness of the epiphanies of the “glitch” that interweaves the “infraordinary” and permeates her practice.
• Mamoru, “iseeyousaw”, 2015, 1inch projection, stereo  |   “The act of listening can make the text, whether it is spoken or written, as scores to direct imagination of the listener at the same time they are sound as well; actually audible sound or “sound” in your mind. Don’t you hear a “voice” while you are reading this sentence?”
• Matthijs Walhout, [violently oscillating], 2015  |   “How I wish to move away from words! No, wait—I do not mean that as such. How I wish to move the words away from words, away from their everything.”

Opening Performances
Friday 5 June 2015 at 5.30 pm and 6.30 pm
During the opening Natasha Taylor will organize two performances in collaboration with Pro Wrestling Holland wrestlers ‘Dragan’ Amer Spahic  and ‘Young Money Chong’ Tom Chong. These gentlemen will step out of their usual contextual environment into another.
Natasha Taylor’s work What happens when you shift special contexts (2015) is situated in the ‘living room’ and takes a look into the world of professional wrestling and the relationship between art and entertainment.

Further information

Karel Denig Gallery
Royal Academy of Art
2 – 10 July 2015
Group exhibition, screening, and performance program

Guest-curators: Maziar Afrassiabi and Jack Segbars.

Participating Artists: Pier Francesco Gava, Arefeh Riahi, Grigoris Rizakis, Ewoud van Rijn, Sissel Marie Tonn Petersen, Anne-Marie Twigge, Marieke Zwart.

This exhibition, which marks the culmination of a two-year MA trajectory, is a temporary constellation condensing and etching the lines that meet, intersect, aggregate and/or diverge. The innate condition of artistic production requires such a standstill. There is no escape from that, and it is also precisely there where the tensions between production within the conditions of our times, and its critical reflection, become potential.

These artists explore topical issues such as: the post-human, the entanglement of politics and religion, ecology, the constraining and liberating potentials of language and space, the object of looking as looking at looking, the continuing echoes of historically burdened contact, the relations between inertia and accelerated production, as an answer to the combined economics of production and exposure.

This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue publication.

1646 gallery
Boekhorststraat  125, The Hague
13 February 2015 – 13 March 2015

A fast-paced series of solo exhibitions with an accompanying program of performances, screenings, events, and a live and published guest dialogue.

Co-conceived, curated and organized by Lucy Cotter, Katarina Zdjelar, Steven Ten Thije and 1646 team.

The Ongoing Conversation II offers a series of fast-paced one-day exhibitions conceived as a platform to show and share the interest of ongoing artistic research.

In the seven short exhibitions, the seven graduating students of MAR will freeze the momentum of their artistic research process to create a decisive entry into the end phase of their explorations. Over the course of one month, these milestones create a combined itinerary. The exhibitions bring you past sites of contaminated mushrooms, a hot bedroom in Curacao, a reflection on religious power at the European Parliament, a playful ritual, an unfolding of emptiness, a reconstruction of a conceptual architecture from the past and axiological dilemma’s in art and commerce. 

The artists invited to realize a project at 1646 are asked to engage in conversation with a guest correspondent via email or DM, be it someone previously unknown to them or whom they’re already familiar with.This conversation spans the period before an exhibition is completed. It documents how their initial ideas develop toward completion, provides insight into the artist’s body of work and is intended to paint a picture of the otherwise untraceable choices that constitute an artist’s practice. This conversation is published in conjunction with the exhibition.

This project is the outcome of a collaboration between 1646 and the Master Artistic Research, The Hague.

For more information about the individual exhibitions please go to 1646 website.

Opening 13 February 2015
Guest dialogue with Nancy Hoffmann
Publication with Mirjam Western

Zwart’s drawings and installations stem from a collaborative and socially informed artistic practice. She is interested in definitions of empowerment and independence, the Dutch colonial past, and personal narratives. Zwart has worked with mental health care clients in residencies at Het Vijfde Seizoen (Den Dolder, NL) and IBB (Curacao), where the presented video work 45 Degrees (2015) and accompanying drawing series Hatterman’s Hand, After “Arbeider (Neger) 1939”(2014) were made.

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Opening 17 February 2015
Guest dialogue and publication with Aernout Mik

How are words transformed into power and how do they gain authority? What happens when images contradict sound or voice? What difference does it make to the political message that the person speaking the words is not the person mouthing the words on screen?

Gava’s videos at 1646 explore the performativity of the political and religious speech through the disembodiment of the voice and question the value of the spoken word in relation to its performer.

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Opening 21 January 2014
Guest dialogue and publication with Sher Doruff

Let’s begin with my mother’s green hairbrush: an oblong plastic brush with undulating patches where the material had been melted from a casually misplaced cigarette. Upon her purchase of a new brush, the green one was promptly confiscated by my brother and used as a ping-pong paddle– an object that had once possessed a distinct functionality now serving an alternative purpose. One could say that once the dominance of an object’s default use fades, a myriad of other possibilities come into existence, and thus everything acquires the status of being a container – regardless of the specifications of the object’s actual physicality – a container of possibilities.

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Opening 24 February 2015
Guest dialogue with Jake Winchester
Publication text: Lisanne Hoogerwerf

Throughout the history of western culture there’s been an ongoing familiarity between art and spiritual tendencies. Van Rijn is interested in how the spiritual fluctuates between a culture’s margins and center and how it revives and/or creates systems of representation. Both art and spiritual practices might represent ‘possible ways of looking at reality and the pursuit of knowledge’*

Building on his experience from this experimental program, Van Rijn developed a group performance at 1646 merging yoga, tarot reading, shamanic travelling (using mandala and trataka meditation) to serve as entry point for a form of storytelling as theory in practice, in which all may participate.

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Opening 27 February 2015
Guest dialogue and publication with Territorial Agency

Opening 03 March 2015
Guest dialogue and publication with Philip Schuette

In 1897, Leo Tolstoy wrote a book under the title “What is Art?”. Due to censorship the book was first published outside Russia in English.Throughout, Tolstoy exposes his main ideas on art, ideas that he had been working on for the 15 last years before its publication. Despite the serious attempt from a philosophical point of view, as Tolstoy elaborates on very traditional problems in Aesthetics such as what is beauty and “the beautiful”, is art created in order to cause mere pleasure? and the views of philosophers including Plato and Aristotle to Baumgarten and other contemporaries of his, the final product could be characterized rather problematic and poor as concerning its philosophical value. However, Tolstoy manages to make a statement …

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Opening 06 March 2015
Guest dialogue and publication with Alexandra Landre

In this exhibition Anne-Marie Twigge opens up parts of the complex trajectory she embarked on in early 2014 where she began to formulate the Artist Investment Proposition. Through research she grapples with the logic of value (“everyone understands the value of logic but what is the logic of value?”) and in this show she particularly deals with the representations of this concept through the material and immaterial one finds in the art world. The trajectory travels through renowned art fairs where she questions art of value or the value of art, the artist as entrepreneur or start-up, emotional versus capital engagements, copyright and intellectual property, the booming art market and disparity amongst artist incomes.

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Gemak Center for Contemporary Art
04 – 18 July 2014
Group exhibition with daily performance programme

The Royal Academy of Art
11 – 18 July 2014
Exhibition with daily performance programme

1646 gallery: special event, July 10, 2014, 7pm: Screening of The Joycean Society (2013), by Dora García, followed by a discussion with the artist.

Guest-curator: Virginie Bobin.

Participating artists: Dora Garcia, Cecilia Bengtsson, Sharelly Emanualson, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Annabel Kanaar, Quenton Miller, Sara Pape García, Julia Reist.

When the game in question is called “artistic research”, the possibilities for play increase commensurately to the importance of the “process”. The exhibition and performance program Un Sentiment de comme si (An Impression of As If) investigates possible ways of sharing processes of artistic research through the display of both works in progress and final works retracing the paths explored by the Graduates from the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) over two years. It embraces story-telling, narrative transfers, communication gaps, translation glitches, and the suspension of (dis)belief, and convokes multiple voices that wave through the exhibition both figuratively and physically. Stories, films, performances, scores, exercises, and sculptures by Cecilia Bengtsson, Sharelly Emanuelson, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Annabel Kanaar, Quenton Miller, Sara Pape Garcia, and Julia Reist meet works by Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Robert Ashley, Samuel Beckett and Dora Garcia, presented here as discreet presences that trigger further correspondences for both the artists and the visitors, suggesting that the exhibition is not an end but yet another step in the games played.

Daily performance program:
Dora García,  The Instant Narrative, 3 – 5 pm

Additional performances:
Cecilia Bengtsson
Hannah Dawn Henderson

A special publication edited by Virginie Bobin with contributions by the artists, the guest curator and curator/ writer Chris Fitzpatrick will be released for the exhibition. Play – as French intellectual Roger Caillois wrote in his seminal 1958 study Man, Play and Games – usually elicits “un sentiment de comme si”, an impression of as if: an awareness that one operates in a specific space and time, separated from a more troubled reality. It is a space of anticipation, of rehearsal for the processes of negotiation and persuasion and the agonism that inhabit this reality. This space of exception is not far from that of the school – or the exhibition space : both spaces of illusion, of in-lusio – or entering the game.

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Quartair, Toussaintkade 55 The Hague
13 – 22 June 2014

Participating artists: Pierfrancesco Gava, Arefeh Riahi, Ewoud van Rijn, Grigoris Rizakis, Sissel Marie Tonn, Anne-Marie Twigge, Marieke Zwart.

Group exhibition with performance programme

Further information

A fast-paced series of solo exhibitions with guest performances and lectures.
Co-conceived by Lucy Cotter, Katarina Zdjelar, Steven Ten Thije and 1646.
Held at and co-organized by 1646 gallery, The Hague.
Accompanied by a series of live and published dialogues with guests.

The Ongoing Conversation offered a series of fast-paced one-day exhibitions, conceived as a dialogue rather than a series of isolated events. During three weeks the exhibition spaces became a stage for orchestrated ambiguity, paradox, spectatorship and theatricality. From Melville to Wikipedia, from post-colonial questions to universal issues as love and death; all of this were explored and performed in six mini solo-exhibition events.

Featuring a range of international artists, each exhibition was complemented with an invited guest who lectured, performed or participated.

The artists invited to realize a project at 1646 are asked to engage in conversation with a guest correspondent via email or DM, be it someone previously unknown to them or whom they’re already familiar with.This conversation spans the period before an exhibition is completed. It documents how their initial ideas develop toward completion, provides insight into the artist’s body of work and is intended to paint a picture of the otherwise untraceable choices that constitute an artist’s practice. This conversation is published in conjunction with the exhibition.

This project was the outcome of a collaboration between 1646 and the MasterArtistic Research, The Hague.

Opening 14 January 2014
Artist: Hannah Dawn Henderson
Guest dialogue with Iva Supic

The solo exhibition of Hannah Dawn Henderson is concerned with the quietly performative qualities of reading and writing. The works will examine questions of authorship and appropriation, as well as reflecting upon more poetic themes such as presence, absence and distance. By positioning private and intimate narratives within a public context, the works seek to highlight the ambiguity of verbal and non-verbal expressions. Shifting between the sentimental to the absurd, the sincere to the sarcastic, the exhibition also touched on notions of autobiography, story-telling, mundanity and faux intellect.

Opening 17 January 2014
Artist: Cecilia Bengtsson
Guest dialogue with guest composer
A series of three performance events

In receive, return, receive during Disconnected Matter at gallery 1646 eight performers are performing divided in four pairs. The pairs are spread out more or less evenly in the inner room of the gallery. There are two benches placed in the room, two microphones recording the sound, close to the benches and a bar at the back. In order to reach the bar the audience/participants have to traverse the room where the pairs are performing.

The performers have their eyes closed and are positioned on approximately a meters distance. They are making incomprehensible noises and sounds with their voices, seeming to have some kind of conversation. The performers were given the instructions to make a noise directed towards the other person’s body, the other person listening and feeling the impact of the sound and then react by returning another or similar or same noise.

The performance-installation lasted for an hour during which the pairs developed different kinds of sounds and possible conversations.

Further information

21 January 2014
Artist: Quenton Miller
Guest dialogue with Frans-Willem Korsten

The Confidence Man, Herman Melville’s farewell to fiction, is a book of fake feelings, stock market plays, money-soliciting stories and TED Talk-like speeches. It is a sequence of meetings on a steamboat heading down the Mississippi, and though published 157 years ago when capitalism was expanding and the American Civil War was approaching, it’s also a book about the times of PR and the GFC we’re going through now.

Professional speakers and performers of all kinds delivered speeches adapted from the text as a theatrical performance. It was filmed and the speeches and pitches were directed to a live studio audience to test how belief is staged.

Performers: Jeremiah Fleming, João Paixão, Abner Preis, Pasquale Camporeale

Exploring a twilight zone between the uncertainty of beholding reality or fiction this exhibition exposes the entanglement of affects and social models in our apprehension of death, mourning and memory, and invites the spectator to question the reliability of their moral compass. An arrangement of gestures were exhibited and these moments of reflection happened through associative interpretations and, sometimes speculative, re-enactment of art history. These works considered alternative possibilities to the conventional thoughts on relationships. The exhibition included a guest performance by artist Sands Murray-Wassink.

Further information