Wendelien van Oldenborgh: unset on-set

Over a career spanning more than twenty years, Wendelien van Oldenborgh has developed a multifaceted artistic practice in which she uses film production as a basis for generating forms of performativity that critique and deviate from dominant forms of power and discourse. unset on-set, her large-scale solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, presents six film works that demonstrate Van Oldenborgh’s continuous exploration of cinematic methodology and engagement with colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, and feminism.

The works on view include two early projects that delve into Dutch colonial history. Maurits Script (2006), a two-screen film installation produced during a one-day public film shoot in Maruitshuis in The Hague, interrogates the legacies of colonial power in contemporary Dutch society by revisiting historiographies on Johan Maurits, governor of seventeenth-century Dutch Brazil. No False Echoes (2008) debates cultural and political implications of early radio in Dutch colonies, intertwined with a voice reciting “If I Were a Dutchman,” written by Soewardi Soerjaningrat, who led Indonesia’s independence movement in the same period.

Issues and ideals around the position of women are explored in three recent projects. Filmed in Kharkiv and Rotterdam, Two Stones (2019) illustrates parallels and dissonances between the German architect Lotte Stam-Beese and the Afro-Caribbean political activist Hermina Huiswoud, both of whom absorbed socialist ideology in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and later pursued their careers and practices in the Netherlands. obsada (2021)  (Polish for “cast”) consists of footage taken by a group of women involved in the Polish film industry, capturing their open conversations on how patriarchal privilege persists today and influences their subjectivities and professional aspirations. In Hier. (2021) (Dutch for “here”), members of a young all-female band and two female writers living in the Netherlands weave a delicate interplay of their emotional realities, memories, and political reflections on colonial history, race, gender, and sexuality inside the under-renovation Museum Arnhem, a former gentlemen’s club for Indo-Dutch men.

The exhibition also premieres Van Oldenborgh’s new work, of girls, which brings a variety of contemporary voices into resonance with the female Japanese writers, Fumiko Hayashi and Yuriko Miyamoto. Each was active from the early twentieth century up to the immediate postwar period and was known for her strong feminist consciousness, albeit derived from different positions. The power and contradictions in both these women’s words reverberate in dialogues and images of an intergenerational cast convening in various locations, reflecting today’s struggles around gender, politics, and love.

Especially for this exhibition, Van Oldenborgh has created a site-specific installation highlighting the interconnections among the works as well as the viewers’ bodies, gazes, and voices in the exhibition space. The setting is designed to unsettle rather than consolidate, and to interrogate rather than assert, the conditions and frameworks we live in—a point underscored by the exhibition title, unset on-set.

Curated by Kyongfa Che (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
Grant from The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Mondriaan Fund