Backing Vocals: Anna Daučíková
6, 7 June, 2022
Member programming
Online – sign up via the member calendar

In June, for Backing Vocals, we have the unspeakable pleasure to welcome Anna Daučíková as a conversation partner.

After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in 1978, artist Anna Daučíková immigrated to Moscow (then USSR) where she lived and worked until 1991. Her extensive painting practice and interest in photography triggered by her encounter with feminist thought is related to this period. Returning to Bratislava in the 1990s, her artistic practice went towards video art and performance events, then widely organised in the Slovak art scene. In her video art the engagement of artist’s body and bodily action became her main concern in presenting her queer statements. Despite working consistently for decades and at the forefront of deeply relevant conversations—as Paul B. Preciado notes, ‘One could say that Anna/Anča Daučíková is the first Czech/Slovak feminist female artist—except that Daučíková’s work problematizes the terms of this seemingly simple enunciation’—Daučíková’s work has only recently begun to receive the recognition it deserves. Therefore, she’s perfectly poised to answer any questions around sustaining a career and going up against the dominant narratives that determine who gets space and when, while her years of teaching experience and dexterity across mediums can also shed light on the more material aspects of working as an artist.

Anna will be taking your calls June 6 and 7.

Signing up by filling in your name behind an available slot in the member’s calendar.

If you do not yet have access to the calendar, don’t know how to sign yourself up, or would like to sign up to become a member in order to join, contact us via mail and we’ll help you out.

In 2022 our members-exclusive Backing Vocals program continues. Over the past year we were thrilled to hear that some of these one-on-one conversations brought about new friendships, new collaborations or a nudge in the right direction. Such an outcome was beyond our biggest hopes for what this thing could be and do, so, onwards!

Image 1: Peggy Ahwesh, Tears of Eros, a lexicon in the style of Georges Bataille, video still.
Image 2: Peggy Ahwesh, The Color of Love, 1994, video still.

Salon Hang 24/7
June 19–28
On location: Hortusbrug—Dr. D.M. Sluyspad 6, 1018 DH Amsterdam
Open daily between 1–5pm, AND at night between 7pm–11am

Opening: Friday 18 June, 6–8pm. Exclusively for members of Kunstverein and professional guests of Amsterdam Art.

Overnight stays: Available from Saturday June 19 till June 29. Overnight stays, including breakfast, come at the rate of € 190, €130 for members, or free for gold members! Check availability.

For the fourth time in our twelve-year history we are happy to host our biennial Salon Hang, an exuberant, sensory-overloading group exhibition showcasing the abundance of local and international talent we’re happy to call our members.

For this edition we’ll take up residence in a former bridge house-turned-hotel suite adjoining the Botanical Garden in Amsterdam. Fancy! Because it’s special! It’s time to rekindle! Don’t you think? For ten days and ten nights we will highlight the practices of the individuals who back us—a multi-voiced community of thinkers and makers. Expect the lofty and the low, the known and the obscure all sharing a figurative bed.

With work by, among others: 

Hush Hush #5
Il Trasloco

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28 June 2013, 7pm
Location: Kunstverein, Gerard Doustraat 132

The fifth in the Hush Hush series, organized especially for the members of Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York, is a screening of Il Trasloco (Moving out of the future), a 1991 independent documentary directed by Renato de Maria, now presented with English subtitles. Set in Bologna and retrospectively looking at the history of one of the key places where the Autonomia movement took place during the 1970s, the film is a surprisingly personal and heartbreaking recollection of the emptying of a household and the ending of an era, one that was possibly already dead.

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The translation and subtitling of this film is by author Federico Campagna and artist, Richard John Jones and wasfirst commissioned by Auto Italia South East in 2010. This event will feature an introduction by Campagna and Jones which oscillates between the historical, social and political context of the film and the personal reflections and ideas that have formed around its redistribution and the many encounters the pair have had with it over the past three years. This performative dialogue will be followed by a pre-recorded introduction by Franco Berardi himself.
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Members Only

Please RSVP via office@kunstverein.nl

Organised and supported by Werkplaats Typografie/ArtEZ; initiated by Mathew Whittington.

Hush Hush #4

IMAGINED MENU
Quanno tu mangiavi cor pensiero…*
*Quanno tu mangiavi cor pensiero… is a quotation from a poem written in Cellelager by a prisoner from Lazio. The regional dialect seems grammatically odd in Italian, and could be translated to English as ‘When we ate with our minds’ and/or ‘When we ate thoughts’.

The fourth in the Hush Hush series, organized especially for the members of Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York, is an Imaginary Lunch with real food ­– arranged, hosted and introduced by Italian artist Leone Contini (1976, Florence). The eight plus-course menu is made from a selection of regional recipes that were collected in a notebook by Italian war-prisoners in Germany during the First World War. As such, the meal is a reflection of a (historic) community and (a national) identity. Served now, 95 years later, it can also be seen to reflect our current status quo, one riddled with crises and transformed by global migration.

In late 1917, the worst military debacle in Italian history began: the infamous ‘Battle of Caporetto’. Between October 24 and November 19 countless soldiers were taken prisoner, and among them Giosuè Fiorentino, an 18 year-old Italian officer and the great uncle of Contini. From the Cellelager POW camp in northern Germany, these men who experienced displacement, despair and starvation, turned to imagined food to combat their misery. Food became an obsessive desire and an imaginary escape; it was the subject of endless discussions. Speaking about food was an attempt to turn a crowd of starving bodies into a community again, able to share memories from a previous life. In an attempt to humanize hunger, to reframe this primary instinct into a sort of – however virtual – conviviality, discussing meals also became a collective action of cultural resistance.

Giosuè Fiorentino recorded the oral recipes from his fellow prisoners – records of intimate fragments from family lives – and re-assembled them into two handmade sketchbooks, a patchwork of regional cuisine, from Friuli to Sicily. The cookbooks became an unintended ethnographic writing, picturing the cultural materiality of an ‘imagined community’ called Italy.

This action of resistance, conceived in the deep darkness of the First World War, will be turned into a real, collective action in the form of a Sunday lunch on the 7th of April.

Time: 1pm until 4.30pm
Location: We will gather at Kunstverein to walk to the restaurant.
Reservation: Seeing as space is limited, please make reservations before the 3rd of April at office@kunstverein.nl. The eleven course menu will cost EUR 25.10 per person, the exact price of production only. As this meal is being prepared especially for those invited, we kindly ask you to keep your reservations.

Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132
1073 VX Amsterdam

Please note that this is a members-only event, if you don’t want to miss it, it’s time to become a member.

Imagined menu is developed in collaboration with Kunstverein Milan and generously supported by the City Council of Amsterdam, District South and AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Kunstverein’s (gold) members.

Hush Hush #3
The Quiet Volume
A project by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells

28 February 2012, 14.00 – 17.00
Location: Bijzondere Collecties, University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 129

The Quiet Volume is a whispered, self-generated and ‘automatic’ performance (Autoteatro) for two at a time, exploiting the particular tension common to any library worldwide; a combination of silence and concentration within which different peoples’ experiences of reading unfold.

Two audience members / participants sit side-by-side. Taking cues from words both written and whispered they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books. The piece exposes the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader’s sphere into another’s.

“This now of the page is what grips me – the present moment, this one, summoned here with this arrangement of marks/code, ink/pixels, letters and words.”
– Tim Etchells

Members Only
Please note that seating is very limited so we advise you to RSVP before 26 February 2011. For reservation, please contact office@kunstverein.nl

Hush Hush #2
Ad Reinhardt: A Retrospective of Comics

21 November 2011, 19.30pm
Location: Kunstverein, Gerard Doustraat 132

The second in the Hush Hush series, organized especially for the members of Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York, is dedicated to Ad Reinhardt’s Comics. In the 1940s Ad Reinhardt published a series of caustic comics commenting on the New York art world. His broadsides appeared in outlets such as PM, Art News, and Transformations.

For the event Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik bring together a selection of these comics in a single table size print, which will be accompanied by a reading by Angie Keefer and Robert Snowden.

The retrospective was first shown at The Chrysler Series in New York, and is currently on view at the ICA in London.

Robert Snowden is a writer who lives in New York. Scott Ponik is a graphic designer in Portland, Oregon and Angie Keefer is a New York-based writer, editor, amateur engineer, and occasional librarian.

Members Only. Each member is welcome to bring one guest.

Please note that seating is limited so we advise you to RSVP before 18 November 2011. For reservation, please contact office@kunstverein.nl

Hush Hush is a collaborative series of private events especially organized for the members of Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York.

Beatrice Gibson
“The Tiger’s Mind”

26–28 April 2011
Starting daily at 5 PM

Location: Ruyschstraat 4 III, Amsterdam (previous location of Kunstverein)

‘Notation is a way of making people move. If you lack others like aggression or persuasion, the notation should do it. This is the most rewarding aspect of a work on notation. The trouble is, just as you find your sounds are too alien, intended for a different culture, you make the same discovery about your beautiful notation. No one is willing to understand it. No ones moves.’ — Cornelius Cardew

“The Tigers Mind” is a serialised publishing project, initiated by Beatrice Gibson and Will Holder, that takes as its departure point, a score of the same name written by British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew in 1967.

Members only: please rsvp office@kunstverein.nl

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