It was with great anticipation that we planned our trip to Wassenaar. It is not often that a new contemporary art museum opens, in a newly designed building. Hosting the largest privately owned art collection in the Netherlands, the Caldic Collection, this could become one of my favorite exhibition spaces, next to the likes of museum De Pont. The building, designed by Kraaijvanger architects, is inspired by Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the swiss Fondation Beyeler pavillion.

It would also give us a second chance. Eight years ago we saw Leandro Erlich‘s swimming pool on display in New York‘s PS1. An exhibition policy made it impossible to take any photos. A hurdle still too common in this age of social media marketing.

Situated in the Voorlinden estate in Wassenaar, the museum forms a slender, geometric contrast to the 1912 villa closer to the park entrance. Inside, it’s a lot taller than the oblong exterior suggests and there is ample exhibition space beside the more or less permanent installations by Turrell, Erlich and Serra.

While some rooms allow you to focus on the art inside, other spaces and corridors offer generous views of the surrounding estate.

Although it might not be the most conceptual installation in the exhibition, I can’t help but love the playfulness. It’s just so well executed. An extra bonus is the fully operational mini elevator on the way down into the pool.

One of the semi-permanent installations in the new museum is Open Ended, one of Richard Serra’s signature steel structures. Visitors can watch the piece being installed onto its own foundation in a special video room. Even though the dimensions are what can be expected from an installation by Serra, there is a surprisingly spacious corridor through the structure. It is one of his most interactive pieces, one in which the weight of the installation is more present than ever.

Even though the pavillion knows how to create different rooms for different parts of the exhibition, there is a lot of depth to the building. Long views, all the way through the structure, are always just around the corner.

And even beyond the walls of the pavillion, art continues. Surrounding the building is Piet Oudolfs sea of flowers, surrounded by lawns and grass hills.

Museum Voorlinden is a great addition to dutch contemporary art spaces and well worth a visit. The North Sea is only a 2 kilometer walk through the dunes of nature park Meijendel away.

where | Wassenaar
what | Museum Voorlinden
who | Leandro Erlich | Richard Serra | Ron Mueck | Maurizio Cattelan

Something Happened

On The Day He Died

10 January 2016 – After a good night’s sleep
something hits me hard when I read the news.
Much harder than I had anticipated. I’m in tears.

Tears for the death of a man I never met, hardly
knew, but who had been a larger part of my life
than I cared to admit. When David Bowie died
it felt like I had lost an older brother, or a tutor.

It felt like I had lost the answer to so many open
questions that I still had. For his teachings were
always in beautiful but shrouded lyrics.

I realized the meaning of his last lesson.
“I Can’t Give Everything Away”
Now I would never know.

From now on I would have to make it on my own.

~

Or so I thought

Enter OBW, a dutch Facebook group of co-admirers. After the first shock, Menno Kooistra, the man behind one of the most wonderful Bowie tribute videos, invited the group to collect the ultimate list of Bowie songs.

This was not going to be a ‘Best Of’ collection. Every member would enter a song that meant something to them with or without a short motivation. Together we turned this into a lovely and therapeutic project that would become a collective but personal Bowie compilation of seven volumes.

This needed a physical manifestation. Combining the graphic design of Blackstar and a collection of lesser known photos, the collection took shape. Contrary to the official discography, this set never completely reveals David Bowie’s image. The booklets contain the tracklists and all of the contributors motivations.

The process

The process of collecting and compiling this collective tribute turned out to be the best therapy one could wish for. At the same time it opened new doors to parts of the oeuvre that had escaped me, by throwing new light on albums, songs and lyrics featured in the collection.

This was a lovely project to have been part of. Thanks Menno!

The files

The compilation consists of seven volumes. Every set needs 18 double sided A3 color prints, 4 sticker sheet prints, 10 cuts and 35 folds. Be sure to check out this page for any missing components.

The booklets are collected in a fourteen page A3 PDF for double sided* print.

The inlays are collected in a four page A3 PDF for double sided print.

The CD stickers are collected in a four page A4 document. This will need to be adjusted to the exact layout of the sticker sheets used for printing.

 
shotdhd-A3-front.pdf    A3   14 pages
shotdhd-A3-rear.pdf     A3    4 pages
shotdhd-A3-disc.pdf     A3    4 pages

shotdhd-print.zip (418 Mb)

* Double sided print on 100% size requires print alignment

Page previews: booklet

Page previews: inlay

Page previews: disc

After his endless strain of back alleys Daniel Crooks found an even better frame for his video stitches. In his new video Phantom Ride the tracks lead you through a host of railway landscapes, this time with a clever twist.

As much as in the Endless Voids video, the audio is a huge addition to the experience.

(more…)

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In September 2014, the Kindl Centre for Contemporary Art opened its first exhibition space in the Boiler House of a former brewery in Neukölln. We visit the gallery while the Boiler House is dedicated to David Claerbout, while the top floors of the main building show work of Eberhard Havekost, amongst other artists.

Boiler Room

Gallery

where | Berlin
what | Kindl Galerie
who | David Claerbout | Eberhard Havekost

For all the times we visited Berlin in the last couple of years, we never stopped by at Blain|Southern. Earlier this year, in K21 Düsseldorf, we saw Chiharu Shiota’s work for the first time. This October one of her installations opened in Berlin. It is called Uncertain Journey, and however related to the installation in K21 it is of a different impact alltogether.

Uncertain Journey centres around one installation that dominates the gallery’s vast central atrium. Seemingly growing from above, a dense web of red yarn reaches down towards the skeletal hulls of boats which rest on the gallery floor below. Speaking of the ideas she wanted to express with the boats Shiota says, ‘Our lives are like a journey without a destination, even though we don’t know where we are heading, we cannot stop. I wanted to emphasise this feeling of travelling with nowhere to go whilst alluding to a search for a sense of belonging.’
– blainsouthern.com

The colour of blood, the nexus of yarn is laden with symbolism, for the artist it echoes the interior of the body and the complex network of neural connections in the brain. The interwoven strands also express the connections between people, ‘the lines of yarn speak for me about everything that connects people, about changing human relationships…the installation is like one vast network, with the boats carrying us through on a journey of uncertainty and wonder.’
– blainsouthern.com

The colour of blood and the small ship wireframes leave room for a different interpretation, one that fits the exhibition title all too well and makes it an even more impressive installation than it is already, visually.

_____
Uncertain Journey runs until 12 November 2016

where | Berlin
what | Uncertain Journey
who | Chiharu Shiota

The Tiger & Turtle endless stairway rollercoaster on a particularly grey day.

Sometimes it is hard to capture real life colors in a photo, this one works.

From the Tiger & Turtle 2015 series

One of the passways through the concrete structures of the Duisburg Landschaftspark.

I like the composition dividing this photo into four quadrants, the water reflecting the left top part into the left bottom.

From the Landschaftspark 2015 series

Part of the lighting installations in the Duisburg Landschaftspark.

This is such a dark image yet so rich in color.

From the Landschaftspark 2015 series

TodaysArt visitors reflected in the tilted windows of the Scheveningen Pier.

I like how the tilted reflection makes this look like a composed image.

From the TodaysArt 2015 series

A visitor of Taturo Atzu’s installation on top of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam taking a selfie, completely missing the sudden spectacular highlight of the Central Station in the background.

This moment catches the missed opportunity perfectly.

From the Taturo Atzu 2015 series

Wall detail from Bruce Nauman’s Room With My Soul Left Out.

To me this photo reflects the essence of the room, rather than the appearance.

From the Hamburger Bahnhof 2015 series

This is the reading room in the extension of the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof museum.

I really like the color palette of this photo, and how the lights work in the perspective lines.

From the Hamburger Bahnhof 2015 series

The first time we visited the International Light Art Center in Unna, cameras were not allowed. We found out later that there are two exceptions to that rule, on every first and third sunday of the month.

On those days there are no guided tours and one can freely roam the cellars of the former brewery, although part of the collection is closed off.
 

Joseph Kosuth

The first installation after the entrance immediately frustrates when trying to capture it. And it is not by accident.
 
In his light art installation “The Signature of the Word”, the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth summons the power of the thought – and at the same time breaks it down. An aphorism of the romantic poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) formed by neon tubes glows upward from the bottom of a 10-meter deep room, and yet it is not easily readable.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

 

Mischa Kuball

Exiting the zig zag walkway one steps into a dark universe with typographic stars in fast forward orbit.
 
Mischa Kuball’s installations question the characteristics of a room in a visual and kinetic way. They move their boundaries and open them in another dimension, far from whatever time and spatial structure. Space and place are comprehended anew; Kuball is interested in the nature of the human surroundings, and in the perception and experience of the human being in that space.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

 

Jan van Munster

Traversing the passage to the next brewery cellar, blue blinking lights in the ceiling catch the attention. Looking up, a multilingual maze in first person lights up a shaft to the surface.
 
In 2005 van Munster created his light installation “ICH (In dialogue)”, which is constructed in a former shaft of the Linden brewery. The installation creates a visual link between the entrance of the Center for International Light Art and the museum’s underground vaults.
 

 
Jan van Munster’s creations combine a quiet, uncompromising simplicity and poetry. Everything that van Munster realizes is located between extreme opposites, between plus and minus, rough and specular, male and female, light and dark.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

 

Stefan Reusse

Hello, Welcome, Goodbye by Stefan Reusse hides in a nook in one of the hallways.
 

 

Olafur Eliasson

Eliasson’s room, like much of his work, uses light to interfere with visual perception. By eliminating motion, a stroboscope transforms two waterfals into curtains of still hovering blinking drops of water. A variation on his wonderful Water Pendulum installation from 2010.
 

 
Waterfalls, rainbows, fog or light are the motifs with which Olafur Eliasson refers to nature in his works of art. What appears as nature or what reminds one of nature is only pretense. In the context of art and in its bare staging, it becomes something estranged: unnatural and artificial.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

Francois Morellet

In the unrestored cellars of the former brewery many fixtures remain in place. Morellet’s work seems to blend into the language of the rooms, working with it rather than just being there.
 

 
As early as 1950, Morellet described himself as an “abstract painter” and was a pioneer in using neon tubes as the core material during the 1960s. In his honour, a retrospective – in close collaboration with the artist himself – was curated. Early works from the 1960s as well as current installations from 2006 to 2015 will be shown.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

Christian Boltanski

With his installation “Totentanz” (Dance of Death) from the series “Théâtre d’Ombres” Christian Boltanski follows up on both his intention of securing evidence, as well as on the old tradition of shadow play: numerous copper figures are hanging on four small stands. Illuminated and moved by fans they are casting big, scary-looking shadow figures on the walls of the old brewery cellar. These are “archetypes, triggering unconscious memories, images that are often associated with images from our earliest childhood: archetypes that allow everyone to tell his own story” says Boltanski.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

Boltanski’s work never seems to live up to the big words attached to them. Either because the motivations are too universal to match to a specific presentation, or because, although being larger in size, its visual language never seems to surpass home decoration shop shelve knickknacks. Or maybe because I just fail to understand.
 

Keith Sonnier

Much more attractive are the contrasting saturated red and blue rooms of Keith Sonnier.
 
Keith Sonnier’s permanent installation at the Center for International Light Art “Tunnel of Tears” takes reference to the architectural features of the historic room chosen by Sonnier in a special way. Beneath two barrel vaults colorful various-shaped neon tubes float through the room, decorated in color rhythms from red to violet and blue. This way he links the two parts of the room and thus creates an elongated unit, in which color intensity and color temperature function as aesthetic regulatory factors.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 


 

Li Hui

An object that needs to be filmed rather than photographed – yes I know, I should have thought of that earlier – is Li Hui’s cold blue glass encapsulation around what looks like an antropomorphic skeleton.
 

 

James turrell

There are two installations by Turrell in the Lichtkunstzentrum. One of them from the depth perception series, the other one, a large camera obscura room, reminiscent of his magnum opus, the Roden Crater. The latter is strictly part of the guided tour and is not accessible on free roaming sundays.
 
James Turrell’s “Floater 99” deals with the perception of the three-dimensional space, light, and its irritation. It belongs to the series of works called “Shallow-Space Construction Series”.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 

 

Christina Kubisch

Kubisch turned the four deep fermentation tanks into sound fields. On the black painted floor she installed white pigmented speakers of different sizes in a strictly arranged geometry. Being illuminated with ultraviolet light the highly reflective objects seem to float. And just like the fluorescent light radiates upwards, fine-tuned varying tones sound from the depth, which allow different associations with the theme of nature.
– lichtkunst-unna.de
 
The room by Kubisch is somewhat of an anomaly in the light art museum, in the sense that it is just as much – or even more – an audio installation.
 

 
 
SWITCH HBKsaar

Installations from the temporary SWITCH exhibition of students of the HBKsaar.

Daniel Hausig

Nicole Fleisch

Ida Kammerloch | Ingo Wendt | Octavian Mariutiu

 
 
Lichtkunstzentrum Unna

Lindenplatz 1
59423 Unna
Germany

 
With so many big names, so much space and such a nice athmosphere, the Internationale Lichtkunstzentrum feels too big for the otherwise insignificant town it is in. Although somewhat off the radar this museum is definitely worth a visit.
 
what | Lichtkunstzentrum
where | Unna
who | Christian Boltanski | Christina Kubisch | Olafur Eliasson | Francois Morellet | James Turrell | Jan van Munster | Joseph Kosuth | Mischa Kuball | Nicole Fleisch | Stefan Reusse | Daniel Hausig

The Dortmunder U always comes across as an odd mix of an student art venue, a classic museum and a municipal institution. I can see how any two of the three could go well together. Yet, divided by multiple floors, in the Dortmunder U they just coexist.

Skipping the Museum Ostwall we would only visit the digital human rights exhibition ‘Whistleblower & Vigilanten‘ and pop in to Hito Steyrl’s installation a couple of floors up.
 

Hito Steyrl

The ‘Holodeck’ room of the Dortmunder U features a video installation of Hito Steyrl. Large statements over gold suited, sunglassed theatrics on a backdrop of shiny 3D spheres, five minutes into which I got the feeling that this was somehow very familiar yet somehow displaced.
 

 
It took me a while to realise that it was more anachronicity than displacement. What I was looking at was computer generated art from the nineties, only rendered on more powerful computers.
 

 

Whistleblower & Vigilanten

The exhibition “Whistleblowers and Vigilantes. Figures of Digital Resistance” asks what links hacktivists, whistleblowers and (Internet) vigilantes. What is the legal understanding of these different actors? Do they share certain conceptions? Who speaks and acts for whom and in the name of which (higher) right?
– hkmv.de
 

 
The establishment response towards whistleblowers has always been spreading doubt and placing them squarely in the conspiracy theorists domain. This exhibition is no different in that it gives no clues to indicate the difference.
 

what | Dortmunder U
where | Dortmund
who | Hito Steyrl

Lots of shapes and movement in the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast, in the Jean Tinguely exhibition.

With his junk objects, machine sculptures, but also his happenings and performances, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely is regarded as one the most versatile and independent protagonists of the international art scene since the 1950s. Early on he artistically explored the phenomenon of movement.
– smkp.de
 

Jean Tinguely

It is hard to truly appreciate the authenticity of Tinguely’s work between the art of its era. Not bothered by twentieth century boundaries the movement and aesthetics of Tinguely’s work do not speak to me at all.
 

 

Caspar David Friedrich

In the regular collection of the Kunstpalast, one thing stopped me dead in my tracks. Right in between the collection of nineteenth century landscapes, portraits and still lives a strangely mysterious, almost symmetrically mirrored work stood out. This small painting by Caspar David Friedrich just enchanted me.
 

 
Kreuz im Gebirge (1812)
 
I would not have believed that one small painting could intrigue more than an exhibition full of kinetic modern art, but there it was.
 
what | Kunstpalast
where | Düsseldorf
who | Jean Tingquely | Caspar David Friedrich