Sawangwongse Yawnghwe woont sinds 2018 officieel in Nederland, maar zijn werk verhoudt zich nog nauwgezet tot het land waar hij geboren werd: Myanmar. Meest recent in een groot Gesamtkunstwerk Joker’s Headquarters, dat hij toonde in Berlijn. Een werk over drugs- en wapenhandel, waarin vooral het misdadige regime in Myanmar het moet ontgelden.
Van 12 tot 21 september was bij Framer Framed de tentoonstelling Lawan! te zien. Het Indonesische woord lawan betekent: vecht, verzet je. Een oproep die vaker klinkt in Indonesië, bijvoorbeeld tijdens de recente protesten tegen corruptie en de schrijnende kloof tussen de rijke politieke elite en hardwerkende, maar grotendeels in armoede levende bevolking. In de tentoonstelling werden twee projecten samengebracht die beide een ingewikkelde historische achtergrond hebben.
Opening the 15th edition of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual March Meeting, art historian and critic Terry Smith spoke with a voice that resonated with grief. His keynote lecture “Renewing African Art Discourse within the Postcolonial Constellation” focused on the meteoric career of his dear friend, the late writer and curator Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019 at the age of 55. His presence was evidently missed, not only by Smith but by many others in attendance at the three-day conference, titled “The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960” (March 9-11).
Location: Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia.
Location: Framer Framed, Amsterdam.
Melati Suryodarmo, Self Portrait (tryptich), 2018, digital C-print. Courtesy of the artist.
Amol K. Patil, Impression, 2012, henna and Fevicol. Courtesy the artist.
Installation view of Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s Luka dan Bisa Kubawa Berlari (Wounds and venom I carry as I am running), 2022, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable, at “Revolusi! Indonesia Independent,” Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Miko Veldkamp, Unlearners, 2021. Photography Tom Carter. Courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery London.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Protest III, 2021. Oil and acrylic on linen. 88.9 x 142.24 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jane Lombard Gallery.
Agung Kurniawan, Very Very Happy Victim, 1996. Courtesy the artist.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Morphine, 2019, oil on canvas, 45 x 53 cm.
Exhibition: Fiona Tan ‘GAAF’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne May 4 – August 11, 2019.
Agus Djaya and Otto Djaya in Amsterdam 1947-1950
Yin-Ju Chen researches the forces behind what we desire and looks for answers in astrology, science, pseudoscience, mythology and philosophy. Read more..
The heat was almost paralyzing on the day I first met Pallavi Paul in the gardens of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, about two years ago. Seemingly unaffected, she was full of energy and immediately delved into film theory, history and space travel—all passions that inform her video-art practice. Read more..
Enkele maanden geleden fietste Jan Willem Westendorp door Arnhem tot hij plotseling een oproep zag die hem aansprak: ‘From competition to compassion’. Read more..
The work Amol Kisan Patil contributed to the Kamarado exhibition finds its basis in his long-term research project about Indian middle class life. Like most of the middle class people in India, Patil grew up in a chawl; the 4-5 story houses that were built in Mumbai to host workers in the 1900s. The living conditions in the chawls are extremely tough and the stories about them reveal that a middle class income in India does not protect people from living under precarious conditions, with large numbers of people in small rooms vested with parasites, no running water, and open gutters between the houses. The people who live here are for instance employed as office clerks. Each day the clerk’s offices are cleaned by sweepers and for this part of his research project, Patil decided to become a sweeper. On first sight, Sweep Walking – which, as a work of art is grounded in the tradition of Indian performance art – looks playful and much more cheerful than one would expect.
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Kamarado, a curatorial collaboration between Amsterdam and Bombay, brings together a diverse group of artists from various regions of the world. The conceptual core around which all these individual voices and artistic practices revolve is the idea of the comrade, a term that originally meant “one who shares the same room.”
Read more..Location: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The members of Tromarama are among the generation of artists who first hand experienced the impact of the digital revolution in Indonesia during the early 2000s. The internet has not only shaped the way they think, but also how they work.
‘Anything could happen here because – Because nothing’s happening here right now?’ reads the text on one of Lisa Sigal’s archival digital prints from the series Home Court Crawl (2014). The phrase, transposed over an image of a vacant house, captures the New Orleans spirit pretty well.
At the beginning of April, 2014, I went on a three-week research trip to India. On the first part of the journey, I travelled with Jelle Bouwhuis to New Delhi, Baroda and Bombay. On the second part, I went to Bengaluru, Kolkata and again to Delhi.
Project 1975 started as a two-year program of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. The project was set on exploring the relationship between contemporary art and postcoloniality, which gains more and more relevance to artists and thinkers in a context of a globalizing art world. Read more..
Made in Commons is a collaborative project of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Ten artists and artist groups based in the Netherlands and Indonesia take part in this multimedia exhibition. Read more..
With his Primitive exhibition Apichatpong Weerasethakul ties into a long-standing tradition of artistic involvement with the notion of the primitive. His work is among those artists’ practices that motivate a reactivation of the discourse about the primitive in relation to contemporary art and geopolitical contexts. Read more..
‘The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989’, curated by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel for the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, gave an overview of what the curators considered to be global art. In order to disclaim the proposition that art is an exclusively Western affair, the exhibition showed that artists from all over the world now contest […]
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The group exhibition ‘The Memories Are Present’ with Artun Alaska Arasli, Pauline M’barek and Christoph Westermeier in Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam interrogates the objectives that determine institutional divisions and invites its visitors to do so as well. Read more..
‘The Jinn’ presents a powerful and elaborately constructed new body of painted, drawn and animated work by Tala Madani. Arab folklore and Islamic teachings depict the jinn as mythological creatures with magical powers who occupy a world next to our own, in which they intervene without restraint. By tracing the potential intrigues of these demons, Madani scrutinizes human obsessive behaviour and then skilfully sketches her observations – distinctly peppered with a dose of fantasy – upon canvases and sheets of paper. Read more..
By employing strategies of spatio-temporal montage, Vincent Vulsma brings together objects and patterns taken from their contexts in ethnographic collections and the canons of modernist design and photography, deliberately moving back and forth along the lines between what is classified as commodity, art or ethnographic object. Read more..
Between 2010-2012, Jelle Bouwhuis and I co-curated Project 1975 for SMBA.
Project 1975 is a two-year programme exploring the relationship between contemporary art and colonialism. How do artists view the historic or contemporary acts of colonial powers? What role does visual culture play in today’s colonial practices? In the art world, what has come to replace the tacitly embraced multicultural normalization of the nineteen-nineties? In a programme spanning exhibitions, seminars and publications, SMBA focuses on these and other issues, and adds its voice to the globalisation debate.
The title of the group exhibition “In-between Things” refers to some of the characteristics shared by the works on display, mostly sculptures, which combine various materials and practices. Moreover, these works share an interest in intercultural relations and their political imprints. Broadly speaking, ‘In-between Things’ addresses the theme of globalization and its relation to contemporary art. Read more..
For one month, between November 7 and December 7, the 8th African Photography Biennial took place in Bamako, Mali’s dusty capital. In its early editions, the Biennial mostly presented Africa’s neglected history of photography. Over the course of time, however, it also developed into a platform for artists’ views on contemporary Africa. The Bamako Encounters, […]
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As this year’s Bamako Biennial demonstrates, photographic practice has become established in African culture and some African artists working with photography have developed a particular idiom which enables them to advance their causes. One of them is George Osodi, an artist who has taken the relation between Europe and Africa as a point of departure. Read more..
