Stedelijk Statements

Stedelijk Statements | Lucy Cotter & Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Cinema Olanda presents forms the second edition of the Stedelijk Statements series, a new program series in which a scholar, artist, critic, or cultural entrepreneur composes an evening at the museum. The organizor of the program is given the floor to share his or her views on visual art and design. New research and both artistic and academic projects are presented during an evening program consisting of lectures, debates, performances, and film screenings.

Artist Wendelien Van Oldenborgh and curator Lucy Cotter’s edition will focus on their joint interest in the dynamic relationship between contemporary art, aesthetics, and social imaginaries, which informs Cinema Olanda, their presentation in the Dutch pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. The program begins with a lecture by Lucy Cotter in the afternoon, followed by an evening program with the screening of Sound Track Stage (2006-2008), an early work by Van Oldenborgh featuring hiphop- and gabberculture. The program will be concluded with a conversation between Wendelien van Oldenborgh, photographer Ari Versluis, and writer and curator David Dibosa.

ARTIST & CURATORS STATEMENT

“The work is to gently refuse to make statements and to try instead to open up space for contradiction, for multiple voices, for competing paradigms and inconsistencies.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                   - Lucy Cotter & Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Amsterdam 2017

LECTURE PROGRAM

4 – 5 pm | Teijin Auditorium
In the afternoon program, Lucy Cotter will reflect on the relationship between aesthetic and social imaginaries through an illustrated lecture that takes Cinema Olanda as one of its departure points. She will consider art’s ability to hold open space for complexity and engage with its relationship with non-knowledge, drawing on current research for her book Art Knowledge: Between the Known and the Unknown.

FILM SCREENING & TALK

7 – 9:30 pm | Teijin Auditorium

In the evening program, there will be a screening of a film work by Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Sound Track Stage (2006-2008, 23’00”), followed by an informal artist’s talk between Van Oldenborgh and two guests – photographer Ari Versluis and curator/writer David Dibosa. The talk will revolve around the relationship between popular culture, music, and social imaginaries and the role it has played in several of Van Oldenborgh’s films to date.

Sound Track Stage was the result of a public film shoot held in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in which individuals such as Paul Elstak, icon of the gabber hardcore scene, and hip-hop DJ Mr Wix were challenged to play out their conflicting positions in music. Gabber/hardcore and hip-hop are two musical styles that represent two disparate cultures and distinct positions within Rotterdam’s urban space.

CINEMA OLANDA

Cinema Olanda takes as its departure point the projected image of the Netherlands inherent in Gerrit Rietveld’s Dutch Pavilion (1953) for the Venice Biennale, which manifests an idealized national image of openness and transparency. Van Oldenborgh has created a major new filmic installation engaging with the architectural and social vision of the Netherlands in Rietveld’s pavilion and its resonance in lived reality today. The exhibition opens up a national dialogue along architectural and filmic lines, engaging with changing social paradigms and their dynamic relationship to aesthetic forms.

BIOGRAPHIES

Wendelien van Oldenborgh is acclaimed for her multi-layered films that grapple creatively with urgent cultural and political questions and their relationship to historic legacies. Widely exhibited in international museums and biennials, she is currently representing the Netherlands at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Other recent solo exhibitions include .As for the Future. at DAAD gallery, Berlin (2017) and From Left to Night at The Showroom, London (2015). Van Oldenborgh was awarded the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art in 2014. Her monograph Amateur was co-published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; and The Showroom, London in 2016.

Lucy Cotter is an independent curator and writer engaging with art’s relationship to the unknown, to aesthetics, and to politics. She is curator of the Dutch pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale and, among other projects, was one of three co-curators of Here as the Centre of the World (2006-08), a global cultural exchange across six cities worldwide. She is currently working on two books, Art Knowledge: Between the Known and the Unknown and Toward a Minor Curating. Her edited volume Reclaiming Artistic Research is forthcoming with MaHKUscript and 17, Institute for Critical Studies, Mexico City in 2017.

Ari Versluis is a photographer whose work revolves around redefining realness in the context of social identity and fashion. Pushing the boundaries between social and artistic experiment, the images Versluis creates translate into personal stories between the portrayed and the photographer and examine the culture that each of us creates to define ourselves. Alongside commissioned work and staged documentary photography, his long running and highly acclaimed art project of Exactitudes with profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek focuses on investigating the way cultures, subcultures, and social types produce, stabilize, and disseminate meaning in the social arena.

David Dibosa is a curator whose research interests center on exhibition practice, collections, and museums. Since being awarded his PhD from Goldsmiths for a thesis on art, shame, and commemoration, Dibosa’s work has addressed the ways in which exhibitions act as focal points for social practices. He is currently the course leader for the master’s program in curating and collections at Chelsea College of Arts. He is also a researcher in the University of the Arts London's Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN). Dibosa has previously appeared in Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s film La Javanaise (2012) and has been a contributor to her monographic publication Amateur (2016).  

CREDITS

This Stedelijk Statement event forms part of the public program of Cinema Olanda in which Van Oldenborgh and Cotter “bring home” some of the exhibition’s underlying questions to a national audience. Cinema Olanda, the Dutch representation at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund, a publicly financed foundation for visual arts and cultural heritage. The project was selected from 68 proposals with a unanimous jury vote, through an open call to curators. Cinema Olanda is partnered by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam; Akademie van Kunsten (KNAW); Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam; and Nuova Icona, Venice. De Groene Amsterdammer is the media partner for the Cinema Olanda public program.