Single-channel 4k video with sound
Pairing an Iroha poem reading (a perfect pangram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once) with footage of a grey parrot (the talking kind) and more abstract imagery, Licking the Sky, Embracing the Shadow of a Fish in a Glance Upon the Surface forms a short handheld observation and attempt to auraticly bridge feel and touch—screen and skin.
On view at Open! | Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain
Single-channel 4K video, lexicon print, CNC-milled lines to guide, guard, hold
Neither of Us Is Powerless turns day into night. The bright fluidity of the airport turned dark and veiled in bluish shadows, populated by ghostly figures muted in delay. The video is served with a fleshy wavy menu of words taken from airport boutique advertising and smart border technology that includes retinal scanning machines as well as full body massage chairs.
Design by Woman’s Laptop – Studio Johanna Ehde.
HD-video with sound, ceramic supplements
On earth, earthenware, and earthquakes. An electric wiring of atmospheric conditions: earthquake emergency exercises; body weather manipulations; tunnel kilns (anagama) and climbing kilns (noborigama). Approaching the body as an assemblage that is, moreover, part of other assemblages.
HD video, blue fabric
“You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out, saying:
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in”
Road trip to Prospect Cottage, house and garden of filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994), located in the moonlike desert landscape of Dungeness next to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. The video art work shows a politically layered landscape of reinforced border checks, Guardian reader tourism and traces of Blue (1993)—Jarman’s haunting reflection on HIV
Featuring Jonny Bruce.
Inkjet print, a3 folded to a4, edition: 100
An artist, an astrologer and a gardener talk about gardens and gardening. Although the three share similar worldviews, they come to find that to truly understand each other, they will have to leave a world of rationality and intellect behind, to enter a reality of intuition and feeling.
Single-channel HD video with sound and object
He wrote in a blog entry that he went to Fukushima Prefecture last October and again in March to gather soil.
He indicated to take a solitary stand against moves to restart idled nuclear reactors. “I am a lone wolf,” one entry reads. “I will not hesitate to commit a terrorist act to stop restart”, says another.
On-the-ground travelogue through the traditional and modern landscapes of Japan. A layering of polar opposites—rural and urban, old and new, natural and artificial—for which modern Japan is famous. Interwoven with news fragments and blog entries on the 2015 Tokyo Drone Incident: when a radioactive drone was found on the Japanese PM’s roof.
Single-channel HD video with sound
“My friend Sotades, […] representative of the obscene and inventor of the palindrome.”
One of the largest cases of its kind in the history of Dutch law. Protesters and a convicted sex offender. Different protagonists and an unlikely symmetry in their attempts to speak neither aggressively nor defensively, but as equals with the world.
In collaboration with Charlotte Rooijackers.
[Clickbait!]
OUT OF ORDER is a sequence of videos made of appropriations and original footage and forms a discourse on the architecture of migration and its overlap with the architecture of detention.
Located in their conjuncture we are a complicity of voices. In different times we travel: let the haunted become the hunter!
In collaboration with Charlotte Rooijackers.
Professionally distant and emotionally engaged: Elcke Bonsen as a doctor and Elcke Bonsen as a political activist. On the body on hunger strike and about two refused and deported asylum seekers in her care during their 10-week long hunger strikes.
Chapter I Rotterdam The Hagu
Chapter II Conakry
Arnoud Willems speaks of his experience as a lawyer defending Red Army Faction members in the late 70’s. For their involvement in the kidnapping and killing of industrialist and former SS Untersturmführer Hanns Martin Schleyer.
With an invocation of archival material and including EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recording of Hanns Martin Schleyer made after his death from The German Association For Transcommunication Research (VTF): Otherworldly lingering in the form of image and speech.
Large format photograph, framed
Research material: The murder of Theo van Gogh sparked a violent storm of outrage and grief throughout the Netherlands. Legislation on terrorism was further tightened and justice powers expanded. Online I bought a signed (p. 3) copy of ‘Allah weet het beter’. Printed posthumously, in memoriam (p. 7). :/
Single-channel HD video with sound, silkscreen -, and inkjet print
“My sunny Saturdays were usually spent down by the pool, reading or dabbling in woods filled with bluebells and wild garlic. We used to ride the horses out in the woods at night, pretending to be headless huntsmen. […] The philosophy of freedom and self-discipline was both its strength and major weakness. It was the fundamental flaw, which cracked as philosophy became detached from reality.”
Coming-of-age story on the Dartington Hall School. The darling of leftist intellectuals, that offered an egalitarian and co-educational boarding life, yet largely catered for the children of the rich. The school closed its doors in the late ’80s following a series of unwanted high profile disclosures, and a mysterious death of a student.
Featuring acting exercises: a ‘psycho-physical approach’ developed by short-time Dartonian Michael Chekhov. In search of a presumed heritage. Elusive, speculative and dance!
Single-channel HD video with sound
Portrait of a modern dandy. With vanitas symbols. Cas Enklaar—here as art collector—talking about a most recent acquisition while emphasizing his use of both linguistic and nonverbal codes.
Single-channel HD video with sound
Missed Opportunity shows an encounter with the novelist (J.M.A. Biesheuvel) performing one of his writings …*&::**!!
Made during a yearlong project with If I Can’t Dance looking at forms of masking and masquerade, mimicry, parody, and assimilation.
(From the On the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth series.)
Translated transcription hand-out to accompany the video.
Mimeographed a3 folded to a4, edition: 350
Kitchen in Dordrecht. Also mise-en-scène and remarkable place of appearance by Nabokov, Homerus, Thomas Mann, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Gogol, Tolstoj, Vergilius, Dante, Flaubert, Cleopatra, Jezus, and Pontius Pilatus. In ‘Gemiste Kans’ (written by Maarten Biesheuvel).
3 large format photographs
The work installed in the bookshop of Wyspa in Gdańsk.
Mimeographed a4 folded to a5, 12 pages, edition: 100
A collection of seven short stories and my contribution to User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution: a ‘living research’ project by Casco in Utrecht. For Potatoes We’ve Got Potatoes is a gently ironic illustration of things encountered during the year-long project. Taken, translated, cut and rearranged from ‘Een lief, verlegen vrouwtje’ by Dutch writer Maarten Biesheuvel and highlighting an underlying themes of labour vs. non-appreciated domestic-labour or housework; work that isn’t, unless you can pay someone to do it for you.
Design by Rogier Delfos
Offset lithography, 81 pages, edition: 250
A book about bookmaking, about writing and telling stories, and about how these come to be. (Also) about translation; featuring a translation of a story by Maarten Biesheuvel, now titled: Journey Through My Room. In translation, literalness is often sacrificed for the sake of preserving melody and rhyme. But in fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact. I tried to preserve the voice of the original.
However, this translation is not anywhere close to a literal translation, as it is incomplete, as some words are missing; made visible as blank pages, or as blank parts of pages (depending on the amounts of words missing). What is translated forms an interpretation, a gaze or mode of looking, highlighting a highly romantic and maybe old-fashioned notion of a writer who, in solitary confinement of his studio, finds inspiration in the more humble and ordinary things of life.
Further, the publication features a text by German art and music critic, writer, curator and amateur DJ, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, which is titled Pile and Column and explores the notion of literacy, and the role of collecting on intellectual development.
Offset print, edition: 1500
After being asked to bring order and structure to a vast collection of 20000 slides catching dust on the shelves of Andre Klein’s (then head of the applied arts department at the Sandberg institute) home, Rana Ghavami and I were inspired to do a bit more; to take the collection off the shelves and beyond the grey walls of the classroom.
The slides were digitally scanned and structured as originally on the shelves. We invited people from different fields to have a look, for new interpretations and to lecture these at a one-day event. After transcribing, the lectures have been edited into a printed report of the day, forming one part of the magazine. The other part consists of a conversation with Andre Klein and a glimpse into his archive through the form of a poster. A further conversation with a specialist in photographic reproduction discusses the aging process of the slide and how current technology renders the analogue archive obsolete.
Table, video, set design
Fritz Hansen B619 Extending Dining Table Replica. The extra table leaf cast in a blue rubber. On a flush mount monitor plays a panning exercise.
For blue, there are no boundaries or solutions. Fathomless blue of bliss.
