Sat 26, Sun 27 Sept 2020, 11.00–17.00
Richard Guenne, Simon Kindle & Amayi Wittmer, Katinka van Gorkum, Thaïva Ouaki, Manon Malan, Christine Saalfeld, and Matti Wim Havens.
Exhibition view in the central hall of B.a.d.
An exhibition showcasing guest artists from Foundation B.a.d. and the Zimmerfrei#3_guesthouse of NAC Foundation
Katinka van Gorkum
Excerpts from Bittergarnituur (Appetisers), 2020
Vinyl lettering on wall
Katinka van Gorkum (Rotterdam, 1988) is a visual artist, performer and writer interested in the relation between the domestic interior and interiority. Van Gorkum’s life and practice are intimately intertwined around the concept of ‘a house’. She considers this house as a temporal extension of mind and body. She employs notions of privacy to investigate the interior world of humans. While resident at Foundation B.a.d., from April 2020 to February 2021, Van Gorkum is exploring and expanding her artistic practice through writing.
Richard Guenne
Consists of Faded Fragments of Past Observations, 2020
Acrylic paint on canvas
As an observer, I allow myself to watch, listen and experience the continuous creations of different ensembles around me. These ensembles consist of fragments of my surroundings and can be incongruous or harmonious. Collecting and deconstructing the ensembles is my way of creating. This gives me an even deeper understanding of the material, resulting in the discovery of new connections.
Simon Kindle & Amayi Wittmer
Glitter Mica Unicorn Poop, 2020
Installation with horse trailer and 20 multiples (metal, wood, plastic)
Glitter Mica Unicorn Poop is one of the few joint works by the artist couple and was created during their stay at the guest studio of the Foundation B.a.d. It references the excesses of our consumer culture and Artist’s Shit, a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni and a key work of twentieth-century art.
Allina Amayi Wittmer and Annina Nora Burkhalter are the La Bohème art guild. Since 2008 they have worked as a&a, a collective of female artists working at the intersection of art and life. They are interested in placing everyday gestures into an art context and artistic actions into the everyday. The a&a projects are designed, participatory, knowingly guided actions that aim to connect art and life.
Simon Kindle makes installations, sculptures and performances. It is a characteristic of his work that he takes up site-specific themes or intervenes in the art process or everyday life with his works. The audience is always considered and often directly involved. Kindle’s works are characterised by subtle humour, which enables the audience to have a direct access to his works and at the same time invites them into an deeper examination of complex topics.
Manon Malan
Attention Flowers, 2020
Lamppost lights, flowers, posters
This work deals with misconceptions of perfection. I don’t like wearing floral dresses, due to their similarity with decorative surfaces. How dangerous can such decorations be and are the flowers somehow fake? While becoming a woman, I often was conflicted. The things I was supposed to like as a young woman didn’t attract me. And even now, women are meant to look pretty and “nice”. Every spring and summer, floral dresses bloom in every fashion shop. These highly-commercial, over-produced prints are a “must have” for every woman in every spring/summer collection. The irony is both the fashion and the flower industries are very large, certainly not beautiful, and highly polluting industries. In essence, they have little to do with nature. While decorating, we often cover something up and pretend things are ok. We see this pattern in urban development, social media, commercial fashion trends and our approach to being the ideal human. While looking around the neighbourhood where I live, Wielewaal in Rotterdam Zuid, I found lots of floral prints stuck to the windows of the empty bungalows. They cover up a crime. Much of the area’s social housing has been rendered uninhabitable by removing the plumbing and flooring. The bungalows are kept empty so that, maybe in 2024, they can be torn down to build new social housing at double the current rent. Here again, concealment and decoration were prioritised and seemed more important than a good solution. The only thing that is really blooming here are the old street lamps piled up to be trashed.
Christine Saalfeld
Shifting Identity, 2020
Steel, wood, plastic, paint, fabric
Shifting Identity is an ongoing project about collecting and sharing stories and focuses on the interaction between the Eastern and Western world. Saalfeld invites people to share their life stories. As human beings, we are hard-wired to connect to others and to be recognised and understood by others. The project weaves different aspects of life and cultural concepts into a multi-faceted story.
Matti Wim Havens
Untitled silkscreen prints on paper, 2020
The beauty of repeated geometric form is central to Havens’ work. Dynamic and colourful compositions play with line and shape to suggest larger spaces, both natural and humanmade. The screen-printed works use layering and the interaction with subsequent layers to produce depth and movement. Havens uses masking, stencils and rotational templates to create a variety of configurations. Gold and silver spray paint are sometimes added to vary the texture and luminosity. The works can consist of three to twenty layers.
Thaïva Ouaki
Quarantaineterrein Project, 2020
Notebooks on table
French artist Thaïva Ouaki researches zones of freedom or resistance and in-between spaces. During her summer 2020 residency at NAC foundation, she worked in the Quarantineterrain, a former maritime quarantine station built between 1930 and 1933 in Rotterdam. Due to the discovery of penicillin to treat tropical illnesses, this isolation complex was never used for its original purposes. For years, the Quarantineterrain’s history has echoed the history of the country or the city, the needs of people, and their dreams for this place. This project links the area’s past and present. Through image and text, Thaïva Ouaki considers the future potential of a place that has lost its former function.
This presentation is part of