Annual programme 2020 Stedelijk Museum

CARLOS AMORALES - THE FACTORY
23 November 2019 - 17 May 2020

The Stedelijk Museum presents the first major European retrospective of Carlos Amorales (Mexico City, 1970). The exhibition offers an incredible insight into the work of one of Mexico’s foremost contemporary artists. Carlos Amorales – The Factory presents early work from the mid-nineties when he was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, through to the most recent work that the artist made especially for this exhibition. Spanning fourteen rooms, the retrospective comprises spatial work, paintings, drawings, videos, prints, textiles, animations and sound works which Amorales incorporates in his open, non-chronological installations. The visitor can navigate their own route through Amorales’ world, which is filled with fantastical images and stories that delve into the tensions between the individual and society.

BEYOND THE IMAGE: BERTIEN VAN MANEN & FRIENDS
29 February - 9 August 2020

The Stedelijk Museum pays an unique tribute to an icon of documentary photography, the Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (The Hague, 1942). Although her work has been collected for decades by museums like the Stedelijk, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, this will be the first major survey of her oeuvre in the world. The work of Bertien van Manen is well represented in the Stedelijk collection. It is a highly autobiographical visual diary, in which she mirrors, examines and rediscovers her life in different ways, in those of others. Many of her series are long running projects for which she revisits places and people and develops close relationships with communities throughout the world. In close liaison with Van Manen, the exhibition will combine each of her series with the work of another photographer, fourteen in total, including Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov and Rineke Dijkstra. This offers a counterpoint to Van Manen’s work, providing it with a broader context, emphasis, contrast or counterbalance.

DANA LIXENBERG - IMPERIAL COURTS
18 January - 10 May 2020

Imperial Courts is a 69-minute three-channel video installation by the Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg (1964, Amsterdam). The work is the last link in the larger project of the same name in which Lixenberg recorded life in Imperial Courts, a South Central Los Angeles neighbourhood, between 1993 and 2015, through photography, a web documentary and audio recordings. The video invites the viewer into the residents’ everyday lives through interconnected scenes that gradually unfold on the three screens. She chronicles ordinary and dramatic events, parties and special occasions, interspersed with footage of routine and banal scenes, de-sensationalised and stripped of spectacle. Lixenberg masterfully captures the ebb and flow of life within a community that is often regarded as socially isolated.
Like Bertien van Manen, whose work is being shown at the same time in the Stedelijk, Lixenberg builds close relationships with her subjects and spends years documenting their lives. Her working method, however, is very different: Lixenberg approaches her subject with observation and distance, uses a large format camera and strives for ultimate sharpness.

NAM JUNE PAIK - THE FUTURE IS NOW
14 March - 23 August 2020

A comprehensive survey of the work of Nam June Paik (Seoul, 1932-Miami, 2006), a pioneer of early video art. Paik’s multidisciplinary, experimental, innovative and playful work continues to inspire a new generation of artists. The exhibition The Future is Now at the Stedelijk is the largest and most ambitious survey of the artist in four decades. Paik was one of the first to understand the power of mass media to shape our lives and introduced the term ‘electronic superhighway’ to foretell the future of communication in an internet age. Paik erased the boundaries between art and technology, between East and West, and investigated technology’s impact on globalization and everyday life. The exhibition encompasses video, sculpture, music, dance and performance and features two spectacular room-filling installations: TV Garden, where television sets seem to flourish among abundant foliage, and Sistine Chapel, the iconic culmination of the exhibition in the Hall of Honour, a mesmerising installation sound and images from 34 projectors, for which Paik received the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1993.

FROM THONET TO 'DUTCH DESIGN':
125 YEARS OF LIVING AT THE STEDELIJK
May 2020 - April 2021

September 2020 marks the 125th anniversary of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. And for almost 125 years, the museum has exhibited furniture and other designs for the interior. The museum began actively collecting interior design in 1934 and today boasts a world-class collection. This show features landmarks of design history interwoven with the exhibition and collection history of the Stedelijk.
Acclaimed designs by the Thonet brothers, Gerrit Rietveld, Charlotte Perriand, Verner Panton, Richard Hutten, Hella Jongerius and others alternate with lesser known or previously unexhibited pieces by Bertha Bake, the Wiener Werkstätte, Lambertus Zwiers, Nanna Ditzel and Aldo van den Nieuwelaar. The presentation will celebrate familiar designs and also unlock hidden gems.

CHARLOTTE PRODGER - SAF05
30 May - 30 August 2020

The Stedelijk presents the new single-channel video SaF05 by 2018 Turner Prize-winning artist Charlotte Prodger (Bournemouth, 1974). The video was recently on view at La Biennale di Venezia. Much of Prodger’s work looks at subjectivity, self-determination and queerness. SaF05 is the last work in a trilogy that forms an autobiographical cycle tracing the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time. SaF05 draws upon multiple sources – archival, scientific and diaristic – and combines footage from a number of geo-graphical locations (the Scottish Highlands, the Great Basin Desert, the Okavango Delta and the Ionian Islands). SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal is the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta and is only known to Prodger through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged across several years. These indexes of SaF05’s existence are intersected with autobiographical fragments from Prodger’s own life that fluctuate between proximity and distance. Prodger’s preoccupation with perspective, framing and the physicality of the camera as a sculptural device is expanded in SaF05.

MUNICIPAL ART ACQUISITIONS
27 June - 11 October 2020

The upcoming edition of the Municipal Art Acquisitions focuses on projects that challenge existing or conventional ways of knowledge. Our collective knowledge is usually formed by the courses we follow at school, the topics on the news, or the books in libraries or bookstores. There are, however, other forms of knowledge transfer and knowledge formation. Intangible, intuitive, and personal forms of knowledge transfer are often not recognized as official sources. They are labeled as untraceable, controversial, unstable or unreliable. Nevertheless, intuitive knowledge, inherited wisdom, oral histories and even childhood memories, family recipes, rumors, gossip or love songs, also contain stories that make an important contribution to our collective consciousness. Projects that contribute to alternative forms of knowledge transfer in both material and immaterial ways are at the moment being collected through an open call. A selection from them will be exhibited in a group show, from which the Stedelijk will make acquisitions for its collection.
The international jury for the selection consists of: Britte Sloothaak & Fadwa Naamna (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Zippora Elders (Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, sonsbeek20-24), Cédric Fauq (Nottingham Contemporary), Prem Krishnamurthy (Wkshps, FRONT International 2021) and Monika Szewczyk (De Appel center for art).

SURINAMESE SCHOOL (working title)
12 September 2020 - 21 February 2021

The exhibition Surinamese School explores the various artistic positions that were instrumental in the development of Surinamese visual arts. Encompassing paintings, sculptures, work on paper and documentation, the show highlights the work of artists who flourished from the beginning of the 20th century up to and including the years after the independence of Suriname. The show places particular emphasis on artists who, in addition to their artistic work, played a key role in helping to train new generations of artists, such as by developing art education in Paramaribo. Surinamese School spotlights work by artists including Erwin de Vries, Armand Baag and Nola Hatterman from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Jessica de Abreu (anthropologist and co-founder of The Black Archives), Claire van Els (curator Stedelijk Museum), Mitchell Esajas (anthropologist and co-founder of New Urban Collective and The Black Archives), Bart Krieger (publicist and independent art-historical researcher ), Carlien Lammers (inclusion officer / project leader STUDIO-i Stedelijk Museum) and Ellen de Vries (publicist and independent researcher). The impetus for this project came from Ellen de Vries and is based partly on her research into Nola Hatterman.

AFTER INSTITUTIONS (working title)
3 October 2020 - 3 January 2021

The 125th anniversary of the Stedelijk presents the museum with an ideal opportunity to critically reflect on its role in society. In the group show After Institutions the museum sifts through and examines its history. In the late 1960s, a movement known as Institutional Critique emerged as an offshoot of conceptual art, when artists demonstrated that art museums are not neutral, objective environments for showing art, but operate through structures defined by context, text and architecture. In the 1990s, a subsequent movement scrutinised the museum as institution and the way that factors such as class, colour and gender influence who is shown in museums. In recent years, a third generation of artists looks at who has access to the museum, and what the social role of the institute should be. They assert, for instance, that certain communities continue to be marginalised in exhibitions and collections. This show features work from each phase, including new productions. The exhibition includes a performance by Luke Willis Thompson, and a publication.

TOGETHER WE ARE STEDELIJK
A new approach for education
2019 - 2021

More than ever, the Stedelijk Museum wants to play a key role in building a more inclusive, tolerant society where everybody feels at home. To reflect our ambition, we are redesigning our family programme and developing a new project: Together we are Stedelijk. Working with families, artists and cultural institutions drawn from three Amsterdam districts—Southeast, New West and North—the Stedelijk team is designing a three-year offering. Inclusion will be at the heart of its content and themes. The project actively integrates the cultural offerings of all three communities, and is committed to fostering mutual benefits. The Blikopeners, the Stedelijk’s initiative run by young adults, are the lifeblood of the project—they know the Stedelijk and the city inside-out, and are powerful connectors.

By redesigning our family programme in close liaison with families and other stakeholders, Together we are Stedelijk offers a greater depth and level of engagement, and increases the impact of our mission: to be a museum for everyone.

BRUCE NAUMAN
13 February - 23 May 2021

The Stedelijk Museum presents a large-scale overview of the American artist Bruce Nauman (1941) in collaboration with Tate Modern. This exhibition spans a period of more than fifty years and is the first large-scale retrospective of Bruce Nauman in the Netherlands. Throughout his career, Nauman has relentlessly challenged the possibilities of what art may be, and directly confronts viewers with their own physical and mental presence. The exhibition is a non-chronological journey through Nauman’s multifaceted oeuvre, and allows visitors to experience his sculptures, neon works, films, video works, sound recordings, text and works on paper, highlighting themes the artist endlessly revisits. The show also includes some of Nauman’s most recent art. Nauman’s work has been extensively collected in the Netherlands, and the exhibition at the Stedelijk will be supplemented with work by the artist from Dutch collections. After showing at Tate Modern and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.