Motion / Labour / Machinery
October 29, 2015–January 10, 2016
Nicky Assmann: Radiant
October 15, 2015–January 31, 2016
TENT Rotterdam
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012BR Rotterdam
www.tentrotterdam.nl
Motion / Labour / Machinery
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Doris Denekamp and Geert van Mil, Fotini Gouseti, Anne Maria Łuczak, Fran Meana, Carme Nogueira, Charlotte Schleiffert, Werker Magazine
Curated with Manuel Segade
This exhibition explores playful and speculative avenues for critical reflection on notions of labour in the contemporary post-industrial city. At the same time, the show evokes an impression of artistic production. From the disappearance of the typical physical worker to the artist’s struggle to generate relevant works, this exhibition proposes a series of open questions on the contemporary condition of labour. The exhibition is curated with Manuel Segade (Spain) in collaboration with artistic director Mariette Dölle and curator Jesse van Oosten at TENT. Segade is an independent curator, researcher and writer, currently living in Rotterdam. He curated a.o. for CA2M Madrid, MUSAC León, Pavillon Vendôme Paris, the Young Galleries Section for ARCOmadrid, and Solo Show Zurich for ArteBA 2015.
Mercedes Azpilicueta (Argentina) presents a new performative video installation focusing on the social soundscape of the city of Rotterdam. She uses speech as a medium to reveal how social, economic and political identities are constructed in everyday language.
Doris Denekamp and Geert van Mil (Netherlands)collaborate as Informal Strategies. Their installation takes as its starting point the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. The artists connect Luxemburg’s botanical walks to the routine of Amazon workers by mirroring her collecting plants around Amazon’s distribution centre in Leipzig, an example of the contemporary labour regime in Germany.
Carme Nogueira‘s (Spain) project Rotterdamweg focuses on understanding how the urban space is a fabric of micro-stories from the past. A stenciled charcoal rendering of the word “FEMINISMS” was inscribed onto city streets and left with a piece of white chalk for passers-by to use. These ephemeral notes were documented on posters. Rotterdamweg is part of a series of projects about the transformation of bourgeois environments into post-industrial cities.
Charlotte Schleiffert (Netherlands) gained international recognition with her expressive large-scale drawings and paintings. In addition, Schleiffert has always made small-scale political drawings on topics such as intolerance, power, and poverty. Here, she coalesces many of these subjects in a collaged mural, creating a condensed retrospective that addresses global labour conditions.
The assemblage-installation Trust Speakers by Anna Maria Łuczak (Poland) features a video that combines observations on the Post-Fordist City with behind-the-scenes footage taken from a documentary about a hotel in Steenbergen for Polish migrant workers.
Fotini Gouseti (Greece) presents a new project which focuses on the testing of air-raid sirens in the Netherlands, held on the first Monday of every month at noon. Their maintenance and use will end in 2017. Gouseti reflects on what this soundscape heritage unites and what it segregates.
The Immaterial Material by Fran Meana (Spain) looks into the mysterious reliefs that a quaint pedagogical programme left behind in a small mining town in Spain. The reliefs were designed to introduce workers to the principles of geography, grammar and geometry. The images prove how the information economy functioned inside the industrial capitalism itself.
Artist Marc Roig Blesa (Spain) and graphic designer Rogier Delfos (Netherlands) publish Werker Magazine, a contextual publication about photography and labour. They present Young Worker Camera, an ongoing project featuring over 500 images representing the relationship between youth and labour. As part of this project, Werker Magazine will organise workshops in Rotterdam following the methodologies of the Worker-Photography Movement of the 1920s.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)
Nicky Assmann: Radiant
The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and movement forms the starting point of four spatial installations through which Nicky Assmann heightens our perception. She combines artistic, scientific and technological knowledge in physiological experiments aimed at sensory experiences. Set against the backdrop of our visual culture, in which the perception of reality increasingly occurs in the virtual domain, Assmann returns to the physical foundations of sight, with art acting to hone the senses.
In her works, Assmann frequently experiments with the properties, behaviour and aesthetics of materials in physical processes. Radiant is a kinetic sculpture in which optical patterns and colour effects appear through a precise balance between space, geometric form, movement and light. In Solace, an enormous film of liquid soap is elevated and lit in such a way that a turbulent choreography of light, colour and flowing movements is created. The recent film work Liquid Solid (made in collaboration with Joris Strijbos) shows the freezing of soap films in the open air at a temperature of -22 degrees C, filmed at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Finland. The installation Aurora (Studies) is based on a study of the oxidation process of a number of copper sheets. Assmann processes the material—and in doing so, functions as a catalyst, as gradually, almost invisibly, the range of colouring of the sheets change.
Nicky Assmann (b. 1980) lives and works in Rotterdam. She has exhibited, amongst others, in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), Wood Street Galleries (Pittsburgh), Quartier 21 (Vienna) and V2_Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam). Nicky Assman: Radiant is curated by Mariette Dölle with Nicky Assmann.
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Fonds 21.
For a detailed program, please refer to the website.
