CTED RIETVELD AWARDS
INTRODUCTION We are going to keep it simple. No preaching, no speeching—except for this. The graduates taking part in the SELECTED exhibition have recently wrapped up their work, cleaned the floors and walls of their departments, and left the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. They leave behind a family of teachers, students and department heads who remain at the academy to support a new generation of students. There is no letting go, but it is time to look ahead and move on. This exhibition affords us a final opportunity to present a fine selection of work by the exceptionally talented graduates of 2015. They were chosen by an independent, professional jury. Of course, another jury could have made a different selection and thus a different SELECTED. Having to select nominees—and then the winners—from 183 talented students was an extremely challenging task. This is the fourth time that the Rietveld Academie and CastrumPeregrini have organised SELECTED. This year, we are happy to expand the collaboration with Everything is Fucking Art BV, at Beulingstraat 21. The aim of the exhibition is to support talented graduates who are only at the early or earliest stages of their artistic careers by giving them an opportunity to exhibit their work in the heart of Amsterdam. As you enter SELECTED, find out about and take a close look at the work of tomorrow’s artists. They are ready to let you in on their story. Ben Zegers
CONTENT AUTONOMOUS ARTS
APPLIED ARTS
THESIS
TICHO BROUWERS
ÉMILIE FERRAT & FRANÇOIS GIRARDMEUNIER
MARKO BAKOVIC
SOPHIE HARDEMAN
CELINA YAVELOW
LAURA KLINKENBERG
BAHA GÖRKEM YALIM
MIE FREDERIKKE FISCHER CHRISTENSEN & MARGAUX PARILLAUD JUAN DE PORRAS-ISLA & WOUTER PAIJMANS
FLORIAN MAUERSBERGER
SHOW IN BET MANIFE AUTONOM
W 2015 TWEEN ESTING MOUS ARTS
TICHO BROUWERS NOMINEE AUTONOMOUS ARTS Ever since the dawn of post-modernism, the perspective of the spectator has been considered decisive for his or her judgment or opinion. Truth has disappeared in a cloud of context; an omniscient perspective has vanished. The space in which we find ourselves also influences our mood and thinking. Ticho Brouwers provides us with only a few points of reference with which to navigate his untitled spatial installation consisting of furniture, two video screens and bottles of water containing gingerroot. Printed on the bottles is the floor plan of architect Aldo van Eyck’s Burgerweeshuisi n Amsterdam. The repeating pattern of similarly shaped forms branch out in all directions—the same pattern of growth that gingerroot has: buds developing on all sides. Brouwers has his studio in Van Eyck’s famous building, and takes his atelier as his subject. The installation is accompanied by a quotation from work by writer Mark Z. Danielwski on the relation between spectator and space (‘no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety’) and a quotation concerning the double nature of puzzles: they carry both problem and solution in one physical structure. The same goes for Brouwers’s installation. You could walk
through it, find nothing that appeals to you and walk out again. Or you could wonder about the furniture (the personal order we add to a specific space) that has been taken from the studio to become part of the installation, the mysterious bottles and video screens. Through the reception by the audience,something new emerges, the work is activated. The video screens are placed opposite each other—it’s barely possible to see them both at the same time—showing recordings of two cameras circling through Brouwers’s studio. One camera on rails recording the changing perspectives as it moves through the studio, another on a tripod in the middle of the room, circling around the centre of that tripod showing the ceiling lights. However stable and constant, the images are dazzling. The circling movements make perspectives shift continuously: chairs slide behind one another, new objects emerge. The atelier has a double nature: more is revealed when moving through it. On the tip of the tripod is an owl, a symbol of wisdom. An animal that can rotate its neck through almost 360 degrees, and could possibly see the whole room from a single vantage point. Thomas van Huut
UNTITLED
MIE FREDERIKKE FISCHER CHRISTENSEN & MARGAUX PARILLAUD NOMINEE AUTONOMOUS ARTS Foam rubber vases can break, too. Well Now, it Looks as if You are Armed for Battle is a performance set in a multiformscenery of partitions, blocks and platforms in different pastel tones—colours that don’t seem about to burst, but rather seem to slumber. Still, a lot will break in this work by Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen and Margaux Parillaud. The fragile setting turns out to house pure aggression. In a series of performances during the exhibition period, the tame installation will be activated by a tumultuous choreography. The inner tension between the pieces of furniture (and perhaps also between the viewer and the installation) that has, in all silence, been rising all day will come to a climax. The same way a fierce thunder storm can be a relief after a hot, humid day, once in a while Christensen and Parillaud will relieve the installation of its intrinsic unrest. The spatial and at the same time stuffy decor combined with the filmic performance are reminiscent of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by German director Rainer
Werner Fassbinder. This film takes place in the bedroom of fashion designer Petra and shows the hidden tensions that run through her relations with the other women in her house. The room in the film is packed with unused mannequins: in Christensen and Parillaud’s performance, the vases that are carried around function as a symbol of the same passive aggression. The soft thumps of clay smacking against the wall, the loud bangs of the wooden table, the shrill snap of breaking Styrofoam: Christensen and Parillaud have an eye and an ear for a remarkably wide range of sounds of things breaking. In a vibrant choreography and with rhythmical play, a multitude of sounds and movements come forward. What sound does Styrofoam make when it breaks? A glazevase? The soft clay sticks to the wall and even the foam rubber is not innocent. Thomas van Huut
WELL NOW, IT LOOKS AS IF YOU ARE ARMED FOR BATTLE
photo by Omri Bigetz
JUAN DE PORRAS-ISLA & WOUTER PAIJMANS WINNER AUTONOMOUS ARTS The joint presentation by visual artists Juan De Porras-Isla and Wouter Paijmans doesn’t disclose itself immediately. The work is bold in its opacity. The combination of video art and 3D animation on the LCD screen and screen prints (True Talk) and the aluminium structures by Wouter Paijmans (Untitled), which are presented explicitly as paintings, evokes unexpected connections between material and theme. Glittering eyes, flaming letters, a lasered woodcut with four heads printed on it, each looking in a different direction, a tennis ball that could fall on either side of the net - chance is the theme, but the video does not give much explanation. Boiling oil and a steel grill: abstract, but also alluring like a teleshopping ad. ‘HD-vid’, the video sells itself in bright letters on the screen. ‘Look! See! Pay attention!’, it seems to shout. The symbols and forms in De Porras-Isla’s animations shine and deform in a digital fashion. Eyes melt like plastic, and images whirl down like fabric cloths—the roles of texture
and material in a virtual environment differ from what they are elsewhere. The aluminium works by Paijmans are folded, battered, draped and sometimes painted. The emphasised presentation of the works as paintings directs our attention to their visual qualities. After seeing the video, the connotations of the aluminium transform and one notices how ‘digital’ aluminium as a material actually is: shiny, mouldable and sterile. It’s also binary: it’s there or it’s not, it’s yes or no, it’s 1 or 0. In the same room there are a number of aluminium ‘ready-mades’. They are, in fact, handmade by the artist. We see a ladder, a rack cabinet and, curiously enough, an aluminium canvas, with the side of the canvas facing the wall. As if to say: it is the material and not the image. Thomas van Huut
UNTITLED / TRUE TALK
TONE OF APPLIED FICTION A
F VOICE D ARTS AND FACT
FRANÇOIS GIRARD-MEUNIER & ÉMILIE FERRAT NOMINEE APPLIED ARTS ‘The medium is the message.’ These words of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan still offer room for artistic exploration. Because how exactly the message changes when the medium, or the material, is changed remains shrouded in mystery. In their collaborative project Ceramics with Émilie / Ceramics with François, graphic designers Émilie Ferrat and François Girard-Meunier use a classic yet surprising approach: dialogue. The installation consists of a video of the two designers conversing and a number of glazed clay models—a mobile phone, for example, and shot glasses, jigsaw pieces and some undefinable models—with which Ferrat and Girard-Meunier stretch the boundaries between form, material and meaning. A new playing field is established. The video shows their fresh and resolute debate on their progress in working with ceramics - a new material for both of them. The dialogue is explicitly overacted, which stresses the artificiality of the form (a recorded conversation about models they made earlier). The overacting
harmonises nicely with the glaze on the clay models: a shiny layer upon a robust content. The spoken and material form are one. ‘Do you think it’s the ceramics that is giving meaning to our talks,’ one of them asks, ‘or rather that our talks are giving a meaning to the ceramics?’ The relationship between words and things is a complex one. It is a relationship that has puzzled many philosophers, artists and linguists. By deliberately speaking as amateurs, Ferrat and GirardMeunier open up a new perspective on this relationship. The material prompts conversations that lead beyond just ceramics: design in a broader sense, a philosophical ‘brain in a vat’ argument, personal insecurities and the history of art, these are all subjects that lay hidden in the material.The ceramics function as a conversation starter: the medium turns out to contain many messages. Thomas van Huut
CERAMICS WITH ÉMILIE / CERAMICS WITH FRANÇOIS
SOPHIE HARDEMAN NOMINEE APPLIED ARTS While most of the time we just wear our clothes, the most intimate contact we have with our garments is when we dress or undress ourselves. Only then do we feel the fabrics and textures sliding along our bodies and we notice that the clothes we wear also have a shape of their own. In Sophie Hardeman’s stormy costumes, this undressing has already started while the clothes are being worn. In a windswept way, pieces hang where you would not expect them, dresses turn themselves inside out and trouser legs flow upward. Out of the Blue is the title of the collection, as though Hardeman wants to say: all of a sudden the worn clothes manifest their presence. In the meantime, the denim breaks all laws of gravity: the invisible force that for centuries has determined the rules of our fashion. On the moon, a dress would look very different. Almost all the designs are made of denim, possibly the most ordinary of all fabrics. In Hardeman’s daring designs, the revolutionary character of the garment once worn by gold
miners, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and the provos lives again. Equally fascinating are the sketches: trousers hanging pulled out over the hips, shirts just above the breasts and a leg let loose at knee-height in a way that is hardly possible. Impossible designs, perhaps, but also ground-breaking explorations of the form that clothes may have away from our bodies. The powerful designs are wild, but not chaotic: it is the intended windswept deconstruction of blue jeans, denim skirts or blouses. The clothing seems to want to leave the body, to gain autonomy, to show its own character. Thomas van Huut
OUT OF THE BLUE
LAURA KLINKENBERG WINNER APPLIED ARTS What’s that between you and me? The works of Laura Klinkenberg are subtle plays with the space amongst people. Not the cold geometric space of objectively measurable centimetres, but the social space, teeming with meanings, feelings and habits. Jewellery is more than decoration of the body: it is, especially in Klinkenberg’s work, a way of expressing who we are and it plays a role in the way we interact. Earrings literally become silver lines that connect us in the video installation “Ear to Ear”, three videos of people connected by a thin wire from ear to ear. The result is a slow dance of linked faces. Strangers explore the space between them. Will you move my way when I pull your ear a little? Can I get any closer? The space that is always in between us becomes tangible. That same space is expressed by tights stretched between two pairs of feet in the untitled photograph. The space of meanings: an intimate ballet where every centimetre counts. Wearer and wearable exchange roles in
Draagmuur—a colossal plaster sculpture that has a gap at around waist level that one can lean into and lie on. A place that makes you feel the need to repose because the massive sculpture strongly invites you to. The same way the weight of a roof rests upon the supporting walls of a house, Draagmuur invites you to rest your body in it. The position of the body in the wall could be a meditative yogaposition: the belly resting against the cool plaster, arms and legs at almost the same level on both sides of the wall, head down and facing the wall. To surrender yourself to the bearing capacity of the wall and accept the body, as a jewel. Leaf you is adornment that leaves. A sheet of gold foil that fits exactly on the palm of the bearer’s hand. When the hand is laid down, the foil gradually lets go and leaves a shining print. Like the endless reverberant echo of the touch between two people—in pure gold. Thomas van Huut
DRAAGMUUR / EAR TO EAR / LEAF YOU / UNTITLED
GONE M NOT INN THE
MENTAL NOCENT ESIS
MARKO BAKOVIC NOMINEE THESIS ‘Being on the threshold of closing a few chapters and opening new ones, one finds oneself questioning everything.’ In his thesis, Marko Bakovic explores his X Commandments—ten design rules that he formulated—through the eyes of historical manifests and key texts in art and design. By doing so, he not only gives himself insights into his position as a designer, but also takes the reader on an insightful journey into some core issues of contemporary design. At the same time, the text is a personal self-reflection written in an analytical and witty manner. Interesting reading matter for any design student. Xandra de Jongh
X COMMANDMENTS : MY TEN DESIGN-RULES EXPLAINED THROUGH HISTORIES MANIFESTS AND KEY TEXTS
FLORIAN MAUERSBERGER NOMINEE THESIS The starting point for Florian Mauersberger’s thesis was a personal, rather absurd question that he asked himself as a teenager, and that he is still asking himself. What follows is a convincing analysis of the myth of Sisyphus and Albert Camus’ reaction to it. The structure, organisation and original approach make this text a pleasure to read. But in the end, Mauersberger’s thesis is also a biting analysis of the ideology-free millennial generation of the young artist and of how to find happiness in a world that is full of absurdity and uselessness. Irene de Craen
SIT DOWN SISYPHUS
CELINA YAVELOW NOMINEE THESIS The subject of Celina Yavelow’s thesis–loaded language–is in itself interesting. But what makes the thesis original and engaging is the way in which she approaches the subject - a mix of various types of material (film, language philosophy, literature, current events, memories) and registers (short story, academic prose, interview, collaged/found text), all capably, impressively intertwined. Yavelow presents the reader with both basic and not-so-basic linguistic concepts, each of which she proceeds to explore through various perspectives. The writing process is thus integral to the subject matter. The bluntness of certain images (for example guns) and juxtapositions (for example romance with guilt) is largely offset by the assured writing style. A range of literary devices are used to good effect: repetition, sentence fragments, double meanings, omission of conjunctions. An enjoyable, kaleidoscopic read. Louis Luthï
WHERE DID YOU HIDE THE GUN?
BAHA GÖRKEM YALIM WINNER THESIS The theme of Görkem Yalim’s thesis—the animated or living object—is very topical. Yalim focuses on a special type of object: the keepsake, an object that we keep because it represents the person who once owned it and bears an essence of that person inside it. ‘Keepsakes do not embody memories of past events but have themselves become embodied memories; objectified and condensed as a thing.’ By looking through the eyes of his grandfather and drawing on object-oriented philosophy, Yalim tries to find a definition of this highly specific type of object and asks himself whether an object of this kind can be separated from the subject with whom it is connected. The originality and thoroughness of Yalim’s thesis, in which he blends fiction, autobiography and investigation in a natural way, made him a strong candidate for and the eventual winner of the Rietveld Thesis Award. Irene de Craen
AMONGST OTHERS : A SPECULATIVE RE-READING OF KEEPSAKES
SELECTED
JURY APPLIED ARTS
TEXT AUTONOMOUS ARTS AND APPLIED ARTS CATEGORIES
JURY AUTONOMOUS ARTS
TEXT THESIS CATEGORY
JURY THESIS
Irene de Craen Louis Luth誰 Xandra de Jongh
Jeroen Boomgaard Sandra Smets XanderKarskens
TEXT INTRODUCTION
SPECIAL THANKS
A project of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, initiated by Bieneke Bennekers and Marieke Coppens
Joanna van der Zanden Richard van der Laken
Lorenzo Benedetti Roos Gortzak
Thomas van Huut
Ben Zegers Iris Loos
GRAPHIC DESIGN Velislava Dakova Svetlana Bakker
Castrum Peregrini Everything is Fucking Art Gerrit Rietveld Academie David Bennewith Floor Koomen Kees Maas
All photography in courtesy of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the artists.
SELEC GERRIT R ACADEMIE