We Are All Guests #11

Esmé Nieuwendaal

When I wake up from a memorable dream, I like to play a game of connecting its elements to stimuli that I have encountered during my waking hours. For instance, the strawberry seed in my dream may remind me of the freckles on the hands of someone I sat across from at a party the night before. When I create, I reverse this association process. I try to catch stimuli, bring them together, and then transform them into something new. My work combines this free and flowy process with a steady and controlled hand.

Olivier Scheffer

Helmets
In my family, we have a tradition of putting silly things on our heads and pretending they’re hats. It could be a cardboard box or a piece of plastic, as long as it has the sculptural qualities of a silly hat. My mother, her aunt, or myself would spontaneously invent a character to embody the identity of the hat. My series of helmets carries this same silly quality, but they also have a practical purpose. Used for protection in hazardous environments, adding objects to these helmets completely transforms the supposed danger of that environment.

Giorgia Granata

The end of the world is easy to reach | Is not difficult to get to the end of the world
1,8m x 4,8m, banner, Australia
Giorgio Granata was born in Catania, a bustling city in southern Italy, prior to 2000. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophical sciences from the University of his city, with a focus on how to communicate the end of the contemporary world – a topic he continues to explore to this day. Through his photography, he presents postcards from the Anthropocene and often depicts a man formed by the letters S-O-L-O, which is the origin of his name and meaning. His artwork attempts to convey the idea of the end of the world as a spatial feature of the perception of the land, represented by a border that can transform the island into the border itself when there is no view of another land. The print focuses on the unpolluted landscape, despite consisting of two separate photographs with differing tones.

Marina Dykukha 

The Grass I Plant, 2023
Installation
For the past three years, I have been gardening by planting and caring for a small green oasis, which I call the “island,” in a public backyard near my house in Kyiv. Before, it was an abandoned and desolate place. I thought, why not create something joyful instead? So, I decided to start my garden.

I came across a picture of a beautiful white and green leafed plant called “invasive grass” and decided to plant a couple of separate sticks. Each spring for the past three years, I anxiously wait for the small plant to wake up from its winter sleep and gently appear with a basket of water and a smile. It’s been so joyful and exciting. Over the years, the island has grown into a stunning 6-meter panorama, gently invading the surrounding space.

People often associate invasion with something negative, but what if it’s about beauty invading something? Instead of being invaded by anger and hate, I want people to cover the planet with beauty and care for nature and their own mental health, just as this grass naturally crawls. I want them to plant joy, water the idea of gratitude, and celebrate the kindness of nature, the delight, and the inspiration it brings.

Since the plants remain in Kyiv, and I am unable to bring them physically, I am bringing my “island” to this exhibition space with the help of artistic media gardening.

Simon Kindle, Vincent Hofmann

Tanz
Two objects from a performative installation, 2019
Simon Kindle and Vincent Hofmann were invited as guest artists for the State of the City international residency program at Paviljoen aan het Water from October to December 2022. They were previously guests at Het Wilde Weten in 2020, but resided at the B.a.d. foundation during that time. In 2023, they will return to Paviljoen aan het Water for the arts festival “Once a guest, always welcome,” which will take place from July 12th to 16th.

“Tanz,” which was originally shown in the Apropos Gallery, consists of 30 long nose-shaped objects placed on simple supports. These objects point towards the center of the relatively small exhibition space, significantly reducing the area where one can move freely. Additionally, upon entering the space, visitors are asked to put on one of the objects, requiring them to exercise their coordination skills.

Art Ashram

925
Art Ashram (Diana Rhigini, Dirk van Lieshout, Florian Dietrich, Georg Scherlin, Verena Seibt, Klara Adam, Nelli David, Markus Zimmermann) was founded in 2015 as a place for joint artistic work. The collective, consisting of a fixed core and changing participants, formed through a series of residencies. They share an interest in making knowledge, skills, and ideas available to each other as a means of production within the group, creating an autonomous work that transcends individual limits. This community manifests in different forms of culture, developing new business models, engaging in commercial perfume production, inventing analogue mining games, and occupying exhibition spaces. Their games aim to create a collective experience by inviting the audience to become complicit through irony, manipulation, seduction, and humor, drawing from old cultural techniques to question conventional structures of time, work, and product. Sensitivity to the state of self-forgetfulness makes aesthetics, utility, and value take on personal meaning.

During a recent residency at “Paviljoen aan het Water” in Rotterdam Charlois, the Art Ashram artists discovered a valuable source of material in their surroundings: tin cans, mostly from beer and energy drinks, found in bushes, parking slots, holes, and embankments. By melting the cans and using different methods of mould-making and casting, they created Doppelgangers of everyday objects and consumer products that take on an otherworldly life. Hoping to symbolically melt the two parts of the city together, the group explored the South of Rotterdam but was disappointed by the poor yield of cans when they visited the North. They collected 925 tin cans, each with a weight of 12 grams, resulting in a total weight of 11099 grams of aluminum. Each individual object is labeled with a title that is a number referring to the weight of the object in grams. If you fall in love with one of them, just count!