On the Move with Ad van Denderen

The Stedelijk Museum is pleased to invite you to view the exhibition ON THE MOVE Storytelling in Contemporary Photography and Graphic Design in the company of the exhibition curators and invited jury members for the Proposals for Municipal Art Acquisitions. In this series of Gallery Talks, they’ll each discuss a group of works in the exhibition on the basis of their own knowledge and expertise in the fields of photography and design. You will have the opportunity to take a number of tours, each from a unique perspective.

The exhibition presents 28 artists who tell stories in a playful, critical, and challenging way, using photography and graphic design in the form of artists’ books, spatial installations, and new technical possibilities such as apps and websites. During the Gallery Talks, the curators and invited jury members discuss the works in the exhibition according to their professional backgrounds: Carolien Glazenburg (composer of the exhibition and curator of graphic design at the Stedelijk Museum), Anne Ruygt (composer of the exhibition and junior curator of photography), Ad van Denderen (invited jury member and photographer), Mirjam Kooiman (trainee curator of photography), Karin Krijgsman (invited jury member and director of studies of the photography course at AKV St. Joost), and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen (invited jury member and co-founder of the multidisciplinary design agency LUST).

More information about the speakers

Ad van Denderen is a photographer and an invited jury member for the Proposals for Municipal Art Acquisitions. His work can be described as committed photography with a journalistic edge. His most significant project was Go No Go (2003), which he began in the 1980s and continued to work on for fifteen years in order to depict the history of European migration. He recorded the experiences of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and other immigrants looking for a better life in Europe. Van Denderen works for different journals such as Vrij Nederland, where documentary photography is virtually synonymous with a commitment to left-wing photography, and almost without exception in black and white. In the 1990s, this resulted in the books Welkom in Suid‑Afrika (1991) and Peace in the Holy Land (1997). Later, Van Denderen photographed in color and examined the relationships and differences between the seventeen countries on the Mediterranean Sea in his book So Blue So Blue (2003), which was published with an exhibition and a website. In the same year, he completed the project Go No Go (2003), also with a publication, website, and an exhibition. For Useful Photography #004 (2004), Van Denderen photographed posters of suicide bombers who had blown themselves up in Israel. It is striking that while the terrorists were still on their way, the posters were already rolling off the press, along with their heroic texts. Van Denderen’s most recent work was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum and the NRC, for which he photographed the Dutch army in 2008 and 2009. For the project Go No Go, Van Denderen was awarded the Visa d’Or for documentary photography at the international photographic festival in Perpignan. In 2007, he was awarded the Oeuvre Award of Contemporary Art by the BKVB Foundation.