An Emergency Exit Sealed Shut:
Lou Hubbard and Alexis Hunter
April 22—June 3, 2023
Opening: April 21, 6–9pm

Fetishism and a hint of S&M lurk just beneath the surfaces of Alexis Hunter’s photographs… Her rage at capitalism is focused upon the mass media which have, as Judith Williamson puts it, been ‘selling us ourselves’ for profit.
— Lucy Lippard

The materials I am drawn towards are manufactured in global quantities and are of institutional utility. These materials are tried and tested when subjected to acts of control and duress, measure and fitness. Sometimes this process is witnessed and captured through a camera lens, resulting in documents that play on photography’s power to empirically index untenable actions.
— Lou Hubbard

This exhibition begins with a plot twist: an emergency exit, sealed shut. In the first instance, a crisis. Fashioned as a safety measure, the emergency exit should be able to be relied upon, the last resort and a first point of call wrapped up in one. But when that falters, when the structure supposedly there for your protection fails you and there is no possibility of escape, what next?  

Taunt the structure, said New Zealand artist Alexis Hunter (1948–2014), whose work spanning photography, painting and organising was a key contribution to the feminist art movement of Britain in the 1970s. On show at Kunstverein are a collection of her ‘narrative photo sequences’ made between 1974 and 1978, produced in Hunter’s quintessentially serial fashion. The works forensically detail her manhandling of artifacts of patriarchal oppression. In each individual series, she serves up the objects and their accompanying contexts on a photographic platter, storyboarding her fornication with mechanical instruments, bulging crotches and domesticity as a way to subvert the dominant narrative of the male gaze, instead writing her own path to independence and sexual expression. 

Due to the overtly feminist nature of Hunter’s work, it didn’t get the exposure it deserved at its time of making. This is evidenced by an incident in 1978, when a group of male museum workers busy with unpacking her works in Belfast objected so strongly to their content that they were withdrawn from the exhibition. Nor did she receive the professionalism she demanded, a request insisted upon through how she organised her practice, working four days a week on ‘creative explosions’ and managing everything else around them the other two, steadfastly intent on establishing herself and the work of other women artists, her advertising background put to use in full force. This is evidenced in her activist work with the Women’s Workshop of the Artist’s Union, for which she organised a slide night at the well-established Hayward Gallery, empowering women to show in an institution they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, as well as her friendly (though unrelenting) lobbying of the Women Artists Slide Library to include anyone she saw fit (so long as they too subscribed to a certain level to professionalism). 

Twenty-eight years later we meet Lou Hubbard (b. 1957), an Australian photographer and sculptor pushing at the integrity of structures through often eerie sculptural configurations and processes, sometimes recorded on film. She uses everyday domestic objects in her work—brushes, clothes, ornamental figurines—which she submits to odd, often-violent procedures, recombining them in unexpected ways. From surgically operating on marshmallow eyeballs with dexterous precision to working en masse with comically inflatable (and therefore defunct) walking frames, Hubbard’s work is as much about the narrative absurdism of expectation and preconception as it is about an almost mundane trialling and testing of the durability of materials.

While Hubbard and Hunter coincidentally have many things in common—long periods teaching countless students, a background in commercial photography and film, a keen sense of humour, a narrative impulse, an investigation into the body’s relation to and with standardising structures and, though less overtly in the work of Hubbard, the formative context of Antipodean feminist thought—what sits central to this story is their shared enquiry into the submission of materials and structures when force is applied. For Hunter this was an unyielding reckoning with a stifling political order, for Hubbard this is a sculptural and linguistic exercise geared towards interrogating conditions of control. For both, in these narrative arcs and plot twists from the status quo, the material generated speaks for itself: resistance is waged in the fullest, sealed doors will be pushed open with force.

Kunstverein would like to thank the artists; Althea Greenan and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmith’s University, London; Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne; Richard Saltoun Gallery, London; and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. We would also like to thank our members and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst for their continued support as well as VCA Art Dialogues for their project specific contribution.

April 1, 2—4pm

G.B Jones will be coming to you live from KV with Radio Alhara. Jones will spinning her favorites from Fifth Column and beyond, and she’ll be answering YOUR questions.

Join us in the exhibition (on its last day!) to ask us your burning questions about Tom Girls, JDs, Fifth Column, or any of the many fascinating projects G.B. Jones has been working on. If you can’t make it person, join us in the radio chat and we’ll get your questions answered for you.

Tune in to @radioalhara or at kunstverein.nl
Saturday, April 1, 3-5pm Bethlehem Time, 2-4pm Amsterdam Time

On March 30, 7-9pm, we’re hosting a two-part event with and around what the punk polymath G.B. Jones and her Dutch counterparts have conjured into being through publishing.

The evening will begin with a conversation between graphic designer and researcher Rosen Eveleigh and Lot Oostveen, an editor of Wild Side—a magazine by and about the queer, lesbian and BDSM locale of Amsterdam and Utrecht in 1990-96.

Following this, G.B. Jones will take the stage so that we can finally—twenty-eight years after its first attempted publication and subsequent censorship—have a proper book launch for G.B. Jones, the artist’s only monograph featuring the complete raunchy collection of Tom Girls drawings. This publication is finally seeing the light of day thanks to our franchise sister Kunstverein Toronto, and will be available for sale and signing(!) on the night.

Limited spots available.
Entree: €10 (free for members).

In the 90s, ‘Customs’ was really on a crusade against LGBT bookstores. […] I did a drawing at that time for Kevin [Killian] and Dodie [Bellamy] of two women standing in front of a bookcase ‘Subversive Literature #4: Two Sixteen-Year-Old Girls Reading Books Seized at Canadian Customs, 1995’ that showed the spines of all the books that had been banned to date by Canada’s customs agency. I took it from a list that was made by (the anti-censorship) group called PEN international, who I unfortunately only discovered after my books had already been burned.
— GB Jones (In conversation with D St-Amour, Jun 29, 2022)

I think one of the reasons [that] G.B. Jones started J.D.s was to create a world that, sadly, didn’t exist.
— Johnny Noxzema

Kunstverein will begin the new year with the festive opening of the first European solo exhibition of punk polymath G.B. Jones (1965, Bowmanville, Canada). Please join us on January 20 between 5-8pm. Brace yourself… Here’s where we begin. 

In 1994, Feature Inc., a gallery in New York run by the gallerist known simply as “Hudson,” released G.B. Jones. This monograph of G.B. Jones’ work was doing triple duty as the 7th issue of Farm (Hudson’s publication for Feature) and the 8th issue of The Gentlewomen of California (Steve Lafreniere, the resident designer and collaborator at Feature Inc, his own publishing project). The monograph presented an extensive reproduction of her well known series of drawings collectively referred to as “Tom Girls”: originally published in Jones’ and Bruce LaBruce’s infamous zine J.D.s, (1985–1991). In these graphite  drawings, Jones replaced Tom of Finland’s iconic, “hyper-virile studs,” with equally horny, unrepentant leather dykes.Co-opting Finland’s objectified, male-on-male erotica, she presented a freeing world of sexually empowered female role models.

During that era (and more or less still to this day), under Tariff Code 9956 and Memorandum D9-1-1, Canadian customs officials held the power to exercise “prior restraint” of any book, magazine or picture they believed to be obscene. What constituted obscenity was ascertained through a quagmire of perplexing and recursive attributions that left Border Services agents primarily reliant on a system that was open to highly subjective interpretation—in short, Border Services agents were permitted to “use their own judgment”. As a result, anything attached to the LGBT community, regardless of their content, was targeted. So, when a short year later copies of G.B. Jones rocked up at a Canadian checkpoint, the artist received a notice from Canada’s Border Security Agency that the publication had been seized by customs officials and barred from entering the country. Finding herself already operating on a no-budget as filmmaker and with not a dime to spare, she was unable to secure legal counsel for the retrieval of the seized books, which consequently were burned by Customs agents. Despite tariff and language revisions, Canadian Border Services still retains many of the same rights as it did at the time, and Canada’s determination of “obscenity” remains just as ambiguous and subjective. The subjectivity of perversion doubled, the fantasy of power-play stripped to its very real reference point in this violent encounter with the state. 

Drawing out the moment around the publication of G.B. Jones’ monograph and its censorship in the mid-1990s, this exhibition will be both an earnest, admiring fan letter to G.B. Jones’ practice, and an homage to the perfectly vixen, queer world that Jones and her network conjured into being, via film, sound and Xerox. Importantly, it will also mark the belated, though no less significant, republishing and European launch of the censored monograph G.B. Jones. 

Within the framework of Jones’ exhibition, Kunstverein is happy to announce a series of events expanding on her practice. Jones is known for a variety of achievements, including the popularity of her post-punk band Fifth Column (1981-2002), the wide influence of the queer punk zines she co-authored, such as J.D.s, Double Bill, and Hide, the creation of the term “queercore,” and her prolific work as a “no-budget” filmmaker, scene photographer, and visual artist. As such, the public program will feature events that show the scope and influence of Jones’ varied practice both then and now. 

Kunstverein would like to thank the artist, Cooper Cole as well as Kara Hamilton and Kari Cwynar of Kunstverein Toronto who, in collaboration with D St-Amour, initiated this important retrospective of Jones’ art practice and the reprint. An additional thank you to Olivier Goethals for working with us on the scenography. We would also like to thank our members and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst for their continued support, as well as Stadsdeel Zuid for their project specific contribution to this exhibition.

Alex Balgiu, co-editor of the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (primary Information, 2020), joins us in the exhibition space for a deep dive into Kozłowska’s use of concrete poetry. Durring this talk he will touch upon other constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and normative syntax.

Serving: vodka shots and pickles!

Limited spots available.
Entree: €10 (free for members).

Barbara Kozłowska
From East to West, Through the Globe, Towards the Moon
30 September—17 December, 2022

Opening: September 30, 8pm
Followed by an After Party at Butchers Tears from 10pm

While in Prague Jiří Kovanda took to the streets and the Slovenian OHO Group resettled to the Vipava Valley, Barbara Kozłowska left her Wrocław studio and hit the beach. Like many other artists working within the geopolitical region now commonly referred to as the misnomer “Eastern Europe” they were constructing work “within nature.” And yeah, given this and the poetics that many of their oeuvres share, the assumption could quickly be made that at the time a cultural movement was brewing throughout “Eastern Europe” which held a pioneering focus on the interconnectedness of art and ecology. Still, while this isn’t necessarily untrue, what shouldn’t be overlooked is the context in which these artists operated. In this reality, each of their works inherently took on a—however subtle—political stance against the institutional structures (of art) surrounding them. The location in which they were made played a role in that too.

Enter Barbara Kozłowska (1940–2008): a painter who abandoned painting for sculpture, a sculptor who did not stay faithful to any of the accepted schools, a concrete poet, installation artist and para-theatrical performer without métier, an oddball even amongst oddballs and, the centre of attention in our forthcoming exhibition From East to West, Through the Globe, Towards the Moon, which will open at Kunstverein on September 30. This exhibition marks the late artist’s first institutional solo show outside of Poland and celebrates an under-appreciated proponent of the Polish neo-avantgarde who actively committed to interrogating space and its organising principles. It brings together Kozłowska’s plural practice through concrete poetry, ephemera and publications, sculpture and correspondence, a restaging of two early sculptural installations as well as documentation of her performances—designed for various places around the world, even if realised in only a few.

Within the framework of Kozłowska’s exhibition, Kunstverein is happy to announce a series of events that will expand on Kozłowska’s practice.

Talking points and framework: October 1, 4–5pm
A talk by Marika Kuźmicz/ Fundacja Arton on Barbara and her peers (free)

Show and Tell: December 10, 2pm
Alex Balgiu (US/FR), co-editor of the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, joins us for a deep dive into Kozłowska’s use of concrete poetry while touching upon other constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax. Limited spots available. Entree: €10 (free for members).

Kunstverein thanks Marika Kuźmicz, Fundacja Arton, Zbiegniew Makarewicz and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute for their support of this exhibition. We would also like to thank our members, our supporters, Reform, Senso, and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst for their continued support.

After fourteen years of running around all over town, Kunstverein is moving to a bigger and brighter place! ⁠But first, we need your help to raise (at least) €20,000 to cover some of the costs that are required to renovate it. And, we’ve come up with a fun, mutually beneficial way in which you could help us sholder these costs. Here’s what we had in mind: from today onwards you can adopt 1m2 (or more) of Kunstverein’s floor for just €175 per m2.

Go here to pick your spot!

In return for your contribution, you will receive a unique edition (featured above) by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, author of the groundbreaking ‘Manifesto For Maintenance Art’. To us, it feels extra befitting that an artist who—since the 1960s—has been committed to rethinking how institutions are organised and maintained, and who has contributed to our programming in the past is helping us lay (quite literally) the groundwork for our programming in the future.

But, even the smallest donation can make a difference! That’s why you can also donate any amount by pressing the button above. A donation of any scale will be honored with a limited edition button badge designed by the wonderful Experimental Jetset, allowing you to wear your support on your sleeve.

It’s extremely rare for us to make this kind of direct crowdfunding appeal, but if you have appreciated our work and if you have the means, we kindly as you to consider contributing in any way you can. If it wasn’t crucial, we wouldn’t ask.

There is something exciting about a first draft – anarchic, scrappy, full of life, flawed. There is something in a first draft that a second does not. Our lives are full of misery, but what about the thrill of being here together, in this terrible time, knowing that life will not be so terrible once the next draft comes? – Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

Please join us at the bottom of a glass in celebration of Samantha McCulloch’s Lagoon: the first title of Kunstverein Publishing’s new series First Drafts. The launch will take place at lakeside distillery ’t Nieuwe Diep (Flevopark 13a, 1095 KE Amsterdam) on Wednesday June 29, from 6pm. McCulloch will give a reading from the book at 6:30 sharp and will take the form of a guided walk around the lake, through the bushes and in the grass.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoontells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

It’s the perfect pocket sized book to grab before leaving town to various bodies of water, at just €18 (members enjoy a 50% discount).

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.

Mariavittoria Campodonico, Jungmyung Lee, Linda van Deursen
Kunstverein’s Mobile Merch Shop
May 12–15, 2022
Various locations: pick-up points

As part of Amsterdam Art Weekend 2022, and with our own space still under construction, Kunstverein will be roaming around all across town. We will be selling a fresh batch of March Merch goodies at our mobile merch shop: socks by type designer Jungmyung Lee, pins by artist-designer Mariavittoria Campodonico and stickers by designer Linda van Deursen. Come and get them while they are not yet hot.

Here’s when and where to find us:

Thursday May 12, 2022:
6–8pm: Opposite Annet Gelink Gallery (Laurierstraat 189, 1016PL, Amsterdam). This stop will mark the launch of the *new* merch in the presence of Jungmyung Lee and Mariavittoria Campodonico.

Friday May 13, 2022:
12–4pm: Opposite Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (Sarphatistraat 470, 1018GW, Amsterdam)
5–7pm: Museumplein Basketball Court (between Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum)

Saturday May 14, 2022:
12–4pm: Opposite Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (Sarphatistraat 470, 1018GW, Amsterdam)
5–9pm: IJpromenade, in front of Eye Film Museum

Sunday May 15, 2022:
12–4pm: Opposite Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (Sarphatistraat 470, 1018GW, Amsterdam)
5–7pm: Opposite P/////AKT (Zeeburgerpad 53, 1019AB, Amsterdam)

Sipping Dirty Feminist Martinis
May 13, 2022, 9pm–2am
On location: Het Hem

When our speakeasy bar, Bob’s Your Uncle, opened in the back of our exhibition space back in 2015, the first drink we served in it was a Dirty Feminist Martini – a recipe by the virtue of Melissa Gordon served in conjunction with the launch of PERSONA, an artist-led magazine which she co-edits. Since the drink still very much echoes in our activities, we invite you to come taste a serving of this resurrected beauty on May 13 during Amsterdam Art Weekend’s party at Het Hem. While you sip your drink, our director Yana Foque and our former colleague Reinier Klok will browse through their collection of MP3s between 11pm and 2am.

Tickets for the event cost €7,50 and can be purchased here. Members of Kunstverein can come for free. RSVP if you would like to attend.

Also, since part of the initiative at Het Hem is to highlight ​​Amsterdam’s project spaces, Kunstverein will be selling some of its editions and March Merch. What will we have in store? A bag by Rudy Guedj, an ashtray by Sarah Crowner and a keychain by Sabo Day.

Lucy Lippard & Jerry Kearns
Tense (again)
April 28,  5–7pm
On Location: Printed Matter, New York

Tense, the never-released publication by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns that was sent to print for the first time as part of the exhibition Top Stories by Anne Turyn. On April 28, 2022—at long last—it is being launched in New York, the cradle of its inception. 

Together with New Documents we are pleased to announce a special event with the writers and their original commissioner, Anne Turyn, at Printed Matter. The launch will take the shape of a conversation, centered around the release of Tense (2021) and the re-release of I See / You Mean (1979 / 2021). The guests are joined by our director Yana Foqué and New Document’s founder Jeff Khonsary. 

Together we will focus on introducing the publication’s content and context, and touch on the reasons why the project did not materialise back in the 1980s, the problems they faced and legal concerns they had as authors. The conversation also focuses on which value is created when producing a project that was forgotten in the now.

As we’ve nearly run out of copies from the first run, by popular demand, the chapbook has been reprinted as a second silver edition. Both versions will be available at the event. 

Clara Amaral
She gave it to me I got it from her
On Location: Huis de Pinto (Sint Antoniesbreestraat 69, Amsterdam)
Launch: March 1,  7—9pm (free)
Performances: March 4—6, daily at 6pm, 7.30pm, 9pm (€12.5/ €8 for members)

She gave it to me I got it from her is a dormant performance in book form that skips through five generations of women in Clara Amaral’s family and hinges on the one in the middle—the last one in the sequence to not have been taught how to read or write. What at first sounds like some family trivia in actuality offers a glimpse into a deeply rooted sociocultural obstacle that many women in Portugal faced up until the 1950s, before the reform of the education system—which until then often excluded women on the basis of their gender or economic status. 

She gave it to me I got it from her is more than the sum of its pages. Of course, it can be read according to convention, from front to back, left to right, page one to page two, and so on. Most probably, in this case, the text will appear to be nonsensical. This stratagem is employed to underline the notion that the conventional isn’t necessarily right, while also emulating the frustration experienced by someone who is excluded from cracking the code of language. Alternatively, you can read the publication according to its score, which will reveal the path hidden in its pages. Better yet! You can let the author take you by the hand and lead you along this route with manual dexterity, ultimately ripping the structures it’s bound together by apart.

Attend the launch
For the occasion we have  organised a rare screening of Guy Sherwin’s film Messages (16mm, 35min), a diary-essay recording the development of language, in words and drawings, of his young daughter Maya which sits nicely in parallel to Amaral’s own practice. You’ll also have a chance to flip through the book, buy it on the spot and talk to Amaral in person. Please note that the launch on the 1st of March doesn’t include the performance by Amaral.

To join, simply show up. When we’ve reached full capacity we will adhere to a one-in, one-out policy. Please note that you will be asked to show your proof of vaccination, recovery certificate or a negative test when entering.

Attend a performance
Later that same week Amaral will activate the performance (60min) daily at 6, 7.30 and 9pm. Tickets to attend one of these moments on either March 4, 5 or 6 can be purchased via the website of our co-hosts Veem House for Performance. The audience for each performance is limited to a maximum of five.

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.

Lucy Lippard & Jerry Kearns
Tense (Book launch)
June 25, 8–9pm

Tense is a never-realised publication by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns from 1984 that we’ve now released on our imprint Kunstverein Publishing in a very limited run. The release accompanies our current exhibition Top Stories by Anne Turyn, as it was originally intended to become a Top Stories issue of its own. It was only recently—during the making of our show—that it was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer. On June 25 between 8pm and 9pm we will celebrate the fruition of an old idea in a new jacket alongside a talk and a drink with the authors and editor.

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: 

Anne Turyn
Top Stories
April 2 – June 26, 2021

Too Good To Be Entirely True
Words In Reverse
3 Stories
Agent Pink
Foot Facts
This is My Mother. This is my Father.
Eating Friends
Transcript
New York City in 1979
Living with Contradictions
Marie
Shattered Romance
Real Family Stories
95 Essential Facts
I.T.I. L.O.E
Analects of Self-Contempt/Sweet Cheat of Freedom
The Human Heart
Forget About Your Father
How To Get Rid Of Pimples
Red Moon/Red Lake
The Colorist
FIVE
Tourist Attractions
Extremes Of High and Low Regard
War Comics
Pecunia Olet

Well now. 

Kunstverein is thrilled to –finally– welcome you to Top Stories, the first exhibition in The Netherlands to give full attention to the identically titled prose periodical set-up, edited, designed and distributed by Anne Turyn between 1978 and 1991.

Top Stories started in the late 1970s under the auspices of the venue Hallwalls (Buffalo, New York) where, at the time, Turyn was co-programming performances and readings. It later moved to New York in the early 1980s along with its founder. With these publications Turyn specialised in giving space to the writing of one young female author (and those who identify themselves as such) in her network, forecasting some of the most progressive writers of the 80s and 90s such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Constance DeJong, Jane Dickson, Pati Hill, Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Cookie Mueller, Linda Neaman, Lynne Tillman and Gail Vachon, and often featured visual contributions by artists such as David Armstrong, Joe Gibbons, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, Richard Prince and Leslie Thornton. 

Since many of the stories are of an auto-fictional nature, the twenty-nine-odd issues function today as a direct gateway into the mood and network of the New York scene at the time. They give us a glimpse into the cradle of the writers’ later careers as well as a direct take on how second-wave feminism and the fight for equal rights and social equality—regardless of sex—impacted their daily life and thoughts. Cumulatively, the issues shine a light on how important it is—still—for independent chapbooks, small presses and spaces to exist. They are a beacon for fostering and developing legroom for voices that are left unheard on the main stage and propel change.

We are proud to share that we have acquired a rare, complete, first edition set of the Top Stories series for Kunstverein’s collection, and you are invited to come and browse, smell, read and touch the material for yourself. Accompanying the shelved Top Stories is a newly commissioned two-channel film by experimental filmmaker—and longtime friend of Turyn—Peggy Ahwesh. The film unpacks Turyn’s extensive archive and leads us past ephemera and long forgotten notes that serve as time stamps for the relationships and know-how that were there to make the series work.

Parallel to the show we will also be publishing a very limited number of copies of Tense, a never realized publication by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns from 1984. This issue was originally intended to become a Top Stories but never was. It will be launched now during Amsterdam Art Weekend, near the end of the show.

Photo credit group portret: May 13, 1983, Artists Space, NYC by Laurie Neaman

In parallel to the exhibition Bronze Icebergs, Cauleen Smith and Kunstverein bring you The Distance Between Slits and Screen. This two-part, online only film program expands on Smith’s own interests and filmic oeuvre, touching upon topics and methodologies used by kindred-spirited filmmakers and finding itself in latent friction with archival material from the collection of the EYE Filmmuseum.

Running on an endless loop on Kunstverein’s website from today onwards, this first part takes up the suggestion Smith proposes in her new series of drawings currently on display at Kunstverein and rhetorically wonders: What if we collectively redirected our focus and put the revenant energy applied to the monumentalisation of small and foolish men towards the truly monumental, the features of this planet both grand and mundane, from microbes to crystals and volcanic outbursts. It features works by, in order of appearance: J.C. Mol, Cauleen Smith, H. Bekker, Basim Magdy, Huzel and Deimantas Narkevičius.

Ginger&Piss#5: Audience
From Saturday November 28, 1pm onwards
Kunstverein, Hazenstraat 28, 1016SR Amsterdam

Usually, for Kunstverein’s sporadic in-house magazine Ginger&Piss, five specific people are invited to speak their mind or provide candid critique on art world customs and traditions under the somewhat-cowardice disguise of a nom de plume. However, for this fifth issue, guest editors Reinier Klok and Isabelle Sully took a slightly different approach and extended that invitation to you as well, our audience. Split across two formats—a preliminary online magazine-cum-survey and the usual printed one—this Ginger&Piss serves two aimes. On the one hand it provides unfabricated answers to questions about who Kunstverein’s audience really is (or is not, yet!) and on the other it attempts to bring to the surface the many factors that can complicate statistical reasoning in the first place—the very reasoning that is insisted upon by funding bodies and boards alike in order to measure the levels of engagement at various institutions.

As is customary, a new issue is supposed to be combined with a performance and a crowd, but with the absence of that for the foreseeable future we decided to circumvent the limits of our space by stretching out the launch itself, like a rubber band in time. Instead, we would like to offer you a drink on the house when you have the time. That can be next Saturday at 1pm, but it might also be in a month from now, or a year. While you serve us by continuing to show up in support of our program, we’ll thankfully serve you a liquid translation of the answers given to the survey question: ‘What type of audience member do you consider yourself to be in relation to us?’ It’s an interesting mix!

Ginger&Piss #5: Audience is for sale for €15. Members get 50% off!

Seth’s Books Bookshop
November 26 – December 23
Laughter, Columbusplein 233, 1057 TP Amsterdam
Open: Tue–Sat, 11am–5.30pm

Duane Michals, “Photograph of Seth Siegelaub,” (1969) Courtesy of the Artist and the Siegelaub Collection & Archives at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam.

In 1969, when Seth Siegelaub set up the exhibition January 5–31, 1969 he left these typewritten instructions for his then secretary Adrian Piper:

1. Get keys
2. Answer phone “Seth Siegelaub”
3. Catalogs are available only at gallery – if any one wants extras we will mail them. (except for the press)
4. If someone is interested in purchasing work, call me.
5. My other phone is 288-5031.
6. Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 5:30.
7. Gallery will exist for this month only.
8. Every morning turn on both Robert Barry pieces.
9. Lawrence Weiner has one freehold piece (see catalog) – if anyone inquires about this – tell them they can own the piece by making arrangements with Mr. Weiner at GR7-4113.
10. Haved people sign guest book.
11. The tpyewritten Information sheet is for press only.
12. For the first six hours of the exhibition (sat.) take a polaroid photo every 1/2 hour of the Huebler sawdust (looking into the hall) and then place it on the wall (with scotch tape) near the type-written document. At the end of the 6 hours (5 PM Sat.) remove the sawdust and throw it away.

To celebrate the launch of Seth Siegelaub “Better Read than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964–2013 (in which the above note is included) Kunstverein will take a cue from Seth’s instructions and transform our second space, located at Columbusplein 233, into a Seth’s Books Bookshop for one month only. The arrival of this new publication, modestly financially supported by Kunstverein, is especially exciting for us since it marks the important moment that this inspirational material by the hand of our dear friend and former board member Seth Siegelaub is made available to a larger audience in one concise volume, a wonderful initiative from our current board member Marja Bloem. The Seth’s Books Bookshop set-up in celebration of this occasion will be exclusively devoted to selling books by and about Seth Siegelaub, all of which make for perfect Christmas presents. The shelves will be stocked with, among others: How To Read Donald Duck, rare books on the history of textiles, The Joke Book and of course this newest publication.

Cauleen Smith
Bronze Icebergs
10 October – 23 December 2020
Opening Saturday, October 10, 5–9pm

‘The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.’ – Sun Ra

Please join us on October 10, between 5 and 9pm, for the soft opening of Bronze Icebergs, an exhibition by artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. This show marks the Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands and brings together a new series of drawings, a film and a flag designed especially for the occasion.

On Friday, July 3, at the *very* precarious moment in which the Covid-19 death toll in the US had recently surpassed one hundred thousand people and when millions, despite the dangers, were taking to the streets enraged by the relentless (police) brutality and injustice against people of colour, a news notification popped up on screens across the globe. It announced that a presidential executive order had just been signed by the US president that condemned the destruction of monuments and called for the building of a national garden that would feature the statues of ‘Our American Heroes’. The definition of ‘our’ couldn’t be more at stake. The executive order came as yet another sadly unsurprising and vile response from Trump to the toppling of monuments across countries.

Such an action has, at different moments, served as a physical and symbolic public exfoliation ritual for many when distancing themselves from ideas and individuals that they no longer want to be associated with (or never even identified with in the first place). The most recent toppling of bronze was a long-overdue reminder that it is truly time we reckon with our colonial pasts and rise up to the demand to acknowledge the existing conditions of inequity within our societies, and to do so as a community.

Smith’s work, which often takes shape across various forms, is grounded in the imaginary possibilities of the moving image and seeks to propose an alternate future through speculative narratives. And this moment we are living through calls for just that: the healing power of reimagining.
In the forty-six drawings on display at Kunstverein, Smith manipulated the official announcement by inserting the names of significant Black female activists and cultural figures as well as moments of insurgent uprisings that are commonly written out of history.
By repeating, revising, filling in and marking language from the executive order document—and pairing it with images and names of various violently extracted and mined mountains, icebergs, prairies and rivers—Smith lays bare the harmful practice of erasure in relation to cultural significance and the standards of who, or what, is deemed as such. But in doing so, she also points to the transformative potential of rewriting collective memory through the work of revolutionary thinkers and events—ones that have changed our political realities yet have been unjustifiably overlooked.

Juxtaposed with a flag affixed to the exterior of Kunstverein and the film Lessons in Semaphore (which captures a choreographed movement with flags whereby a performer communicates through visual signals), this new series asks how these acts of revisioning help refigure our relationship to threatened environments and undo the destructive heroisation of figures who too quickly have been cast in bronze.

Kunstverein would like to thank AFK and its members for their continued support.

Saturday, September 19, 7pm
Closing Event Summer Res(t)idency: Making Bread into Dough

As we are nearing the end of summer and slipping into fall, please join us on Saturday September 19 at 7pm at Hazenstraat 28 for the final event of this year’s Summer Res(t)idency, for which we have hosted the Swedish, Amsterdam-based textile artist Matilda Kenttä.

Since the start of summer, under the title Making Bread into Dough, Kenttä has explored the importance of valuing laziness over constant productivity during the time when most of us were enjoying ‘time off’. Kenttä has been toiling away at odd hours of the day on a vertical loom she installed in Kunstverein’s front space, weaving thoughts and conversations on gossip, the gendered history of labour and the development of the loom itself into the fabric of the very works she was making. With the space being open to visitors while Kenttä worked, the social and performative element of weaving also became central to her process. This aspect has been literally logged in the four works that were produced, as Kenttä noted the visitors she received alongside a list of recycled items she used (as well as their previous owners) to make the new pieces. To celebrate the four site-specific textile works that resulted from Kenttä’s res(t)idency—such as a towel for Kunstverein’s soon-to-be-renovated kitchen—we have invited Elina Birkehag, Amelia Groom, Adelheid Smit and Elaine Wing-Ah Ho to each write a short reflection on one of the four works. These texts will be made available as a collection on the 19th. We invite you to come and read them up close, right at home in their intended setting.

See you then!

Ah! All of a sudden it’s ten o’clock and still light, still hot and, well, summer. And we were wondering: Does this really count as a season in a year that has already skipped one? Are we allowed, as a cultural body, to slow down in the heat of this specific moment? To rub our physical bodies with SPF20 and protect them (more) just because we are in the luxurious position to do so?

These questions form the central axis for this year’s annual Summer Res(t)idency which recommences on August 1. This third edition welcomes Matilda Kenttä who will be toiling away while the rest of us aren’t. Kenttä, a very *very* recent graduate from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s textile department will install a loom in the frame of Kunstverein’s window. While the days grow shorter again Kenttä will be reshuffling the silver curtain currently casting shade on our space into rags. Although her labour is hers, it will not be solitary. Until August 31 Kunstverein’s physical space will turn into an occasional meeting place (call it a bar) for friendly gossip (as the term was understood in the eleventh century, then meaning friend), questioning who, really, has the right to be lazy? Stories bypassers spin will be interwoven into the fabric, which after summer will filter into kitchens and households.

September welcomes a solo exhibition by Cauleen Smith, initiated by our associate curator Suzy Halajian. Halajian, who was selected out of ninety-four candidates worldwide, will bring her voice to Kunstverein’s program by developing two projects annually. This is the first. The Los Angeles-based curator’s interests lie at the intersection of art and politics, looking at how images are made and consumed in relation to our colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. Previously, Halajian has curated exhibitions and programs for, among others, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Armory Center for the Arts, and Sursock Museum (Beirut). Halajian has also been an integral part of the curatorial team at the artist-run space Human Resources (LA) since 2015 and—together with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—is the co-founder of the journal Georgia.

We hope to see your sun-kissed faces then, if not sooner!
Kunstverein

Spring arrives at the café (BLOOD book launch)
June 18, 6–8pm
Columbusplein 233, 1057 TX Amsterdam

This event marks the unveiling of BLOOD, the newest publication on our imprint, edited and designed by Line-Gry Hørup. BLOOD has been six years in the making. This long-awaited publication presents the first-ever translations of the fourteen (and only) poems written by the Danish art historian and publisher R. Broby-Johansen in 1922, for which he was sentenced to jail. In vivid and gory details, the poems depict the red-light district of Copenhagen’s underbelly. In them, he defends those subjected to misery and poverty, and comments on the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie responsible for their misery. The appendix of the book gives a unique insight into Broby-Johansen’s methodology, interests and life following the end of his career as a poet, through photographs taken by Johannes Schwartz and translations of the archive by Hørup.

Since a more traditional book launch is currently out of the question, we’re launching the book with a special vinyl by the editor/designer, installed on the front window of our *new* publishing-oriented location in Amsterdam-West. Simultaneously, from afar, you can enjoy a series of audio recordings of the poems from the book here.

For orders of the book, please contact us via email. Kunstverein members receive 50% off publications.

Anne Turyn
Messages To The Public
18 May – 27 June 2020
Public space (accessible 24/7)

As a prelude to our forthcoming exhibition TOP STORIES, the first institutional solo exhibition by Anne Turyn in the Netherlands (which due to the corona outbreak has been postponed until the fall), we are bringing one of Turyn’s enigmatic works to the streets and inviting you to go for a walk. On nine specifically selected poster columns located throughout Amsterdam, large-scale prints of the artist’s 1988 commission Messages To The Public will be shown.

The exact locations can be found here.

Anne Turyn, What if the sky were orange, 1988
Computer animation, Spectacolor lightboard, One Times Square, Sept. 1–30, 1988

This work was originally presented in digital form on the Spectacolor board overlooking Times Square in New York, and was part of a larger series of works commissioned by the Public Art Fund. In Turyn’s piece, rhetorical questions like: ‘What if everyone had a home?’, ‘What if there were free medical service for all?’ and ‘What if there were no lines at the bank?’ flashed up. In re-staging an adapted form of this work now, it has become even more evident that such questions are (unfortunately) today, almost forty years later, still topical, timely and largely unsolved.

Never have I found myself dancing in a crowd—or at any event for that matter—looking around and dividing the people that surround me into categories and percentages: 20% native speakers, 15% students, 35% non-binary, 48% parents, 50% smokers, 79% drunk, 12% fun …

Talk about a mood kill!

But imagine, if only for the sake of conversation, it was in your interest to undertake such a task. How could you even begin to categorise and quantify the community around you? Who makes up that community? How do you reach out to them? With full understanding of the delusional validation the data of your answers might provide, rest assured that these exact questions will rear their head when writing funding applications—an unavoidable reality in the cultural field. And, while jumping through hoops and trying to stay true to the audience that you already serve (hoping to grant them the dignity of not becoming a stereotype) as well as those “potentially untapped” audiences you’re gently puppeteered toward by the political desires embedded in each application, what comes to mind above all is: what makes you stick to us? Or is it the other way around, as current events have provoked me to ask—have we, unknowingly but ever so gratefully, been sticking to you?

To better understand this conundrum we decided, at the start of 2020, to devote the fifth issue of our in-house magazine Ginger&Piss to this, aptly titled “Audience”. In no way imaginable could we have foreseen then how important its preliminary online format would become, now that one country after another has gone into lockdown, the whole apparatus of society has started to slow down, institutions across the world are hosting exhibitions that will never be physically visited, and many of us are haphazardly putting together an “online equivalent,” legitimising our efforts (and our paychecks) despite the absence of, well, you.

This issue of Ginger&Piss—part confession booth, part audience survey in disguise—serves two aims: first, it seeks to provide unfabricated answers to questions about who our audience is (or is not) and to qualify their engagement with us, and second, it attempts to bring to the surface the many factors that can complicate statistical reasoning. We, who are in the business of creative license after all, are strikingly aware that questions can be shaped to receive answers that shine a favourable light on this or that. A multiple choice question can be formalised in a way that no matter which option you select it will return the predicted outcome, an outcome that is often geared towards placating funding partners. Hard data that spells out a whiny “you see!”

While this strategy is our main reason for going against the usual practice of rendering a survey authorless by acknowledging our guest editors Isabelle Sully and Reinier Klok as its architects, you will also find a number of contributions dotted throughout the survey written under the guise of a pseudonym (offering our authors the—somewhat cowardly—liberty to speak to their own experiences with data politics and audience profiling in the artistic field without having to fear backlash). It goes without saying that the answers you provide, making you both a subject of and an accomplice to this issue of Ginger&Piss, enjoy the same anonymity.

It will only take, as the vague invocation goes, a minute of your time…

here

The How and the What – edition hansjörg mayer
15 February – 11 April 2020
Extended until 21 June

From Thursday May 21 we welcome you back to The How and The What – edition hansjörg mayer. In addition to the first leg of the exhibition, which had focused on Mayer’s early typographic and film experiments, it will now feature almost the entire output of Mayer’s imprint, including the early Futura magazines as well as later ethnographical publications which earlier were on show at EENWERK.

The catalogue can be browsed during our regular opening hours (and by appointment) until the end of June, and is open to a maximum of two visitors at a time.

Kunstverein, Boekie Woekie and Eenwerk are happy to invite you to their joint exhibition of Hansjörg Mayer: “typoet,” concrete poet, printer, publisher and teacher. This fragmented exhibition – with the resolve of an institutional show – brings together Mayer’s (Stuttgart, 1943) extensive and diverse oeuvre. By placing Mayer’s work in the context of the bookstore, the street, the library, the gallery and the school, different aspects of his practice are shown.

Kunstverein
(Hazenstraat 28, Amsterdam. Open Thu–Sat, 1–6pm or by appointment)
Early experiments with typography and film take center stage at Kunstverein. From outside, projected directly onto the large front window of the space, passersby can watch the little-known films Mayer made as part of the Filma Arbeits Team. F.A.T. was a pioneering experimental film-making project set up by Georg Bense, Hansjorg Mayer and Rainer Wössner in Stuttgart. The films show their intense preoccupation with language, text and structure. Inside, Mayer’s own concrete poems and experiments with typography and printing techniques will be shown. These early works – in which the graphic and poetic is a result of experiments with technology and material – are key to understanding Mayer’s work.

Boekie Woekie
(Berenstraat 16, Amsterdam. Open Daily, 12–6pm)
Boekie Woekie is the artists’ bookstore run by the artists Henriëtte van Egten, Rúna Thorkelsdóttir and Jan Voss. On this occasion (almost) all of Roth’s books, published by Mayer, will be on display alongside the many Roth books they regulary hold.

Eenwerk
(Koninginneweg 176, Amsterdam. Open Thu–Sat, 1–6pm) – as the name suggests – shows only one work by one artist at the time. In the main gallery, enlarged pages from Mayer’s Typoaktionen as well as the ‘leporello’ itself will be shown. In addition, many books published by edition hansjörg mayer will be on show in the library of Irma Boom, adjacent to Eenwerk. Visitors are invited to browse through this immense, inspirational collection of publications, including Mayer’s own ‘typoems’, the Futura series, artists’ publications, artists’ catalogues and his later ethnographic books.

Finally, a first! At all locations, visitors can listen to records from Selten Gehörte Musik (Seldom Heard Music) – Mayer’s record label which captured the improvisation and mayhem of (among others) Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Hermann Nitsch and Oswald Wiener .

The exhibition is based on an idea by Marja Bloem.

Additional Event in collaboration with Studium Generale Rietveld Academie
20 March 2020, 4–6 pm

An afternoon of talks with Hansjörg Mayer and his contemporaries will take place at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Dialogues between the work and working methods of Hansjörg Mayer and kindred spirits will be discussed. The full program will be announced soon via https://studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl. Additionally, a selection of work produced by Mayer and his students while he was teaching at Bath Academy and Watford School of Art, will be on display at the library.

This exhibition has been made possible through the kind support of Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Kunstverein’s (Gold) Members and Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.

Still from Dec 16 of the 365 Day Project by Jonas Mekas, edited with Elle Burchill.

Tonight at 7pm we are organising a one time only screening of films by Jonas Mekas and Elle Burchill in the presence of the filmmaker/editor herself at Cinema De Uitkijk, Prinsengracht 452. Entrance is 10€ (5€ for members). This screening is a part of our current exhibition Who’s Werner? that looks into the labour and voices of long term “assistants” of well known artists.

Who’s Werner? is on until the end of this week.

We invite you to attend the celebratory launch of Grace Crowley – the newest publication of Riet Wijnen on our imprint Kunstverein Publishing. This launch will take place within the exhibition Who’s Werner? on 24 November at 3pm with a reading by Riet Wijnen and Rindon Johnson.

Grace Crowley is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorized by Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’, and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.

For the occasion Wijnen has invited writer and artist Rindon Johnson to read Conversation Six: Double Lines together. This fictional dialogue brings Grace Crowley and the British Constructivist Marlow Moss (1889–1958) together, which partly stems from Marlow Moss, a book by Wijnen previously published on our imprint in 2013. Through short monologues Moss and Crowley introduce us to important personal, professional and political relationships they maintained throughout their lives, and slowly parallels start to unfold between their two lives. Similarly to the book this conversation is also divided into subsections such as ‘Mentor’, ‘Lovers’ and ‘Gender’.

This publication was made possible with the support of Biennale of Sydney, Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, and Stichting Egress Foundation.

Who’s Werner?
23 November – 21 December 2019

Opening: 22 November, 5–9pm

Who’s Werner? is a spacial conversation that explores artistic practices that have become intertwined and focuses on the role of a figure whose work is commonly kept a public secret. It looks into some mutualistic relationships between artists in various disciplines and their assistants; producers; sometimes lovers. The exhibition reveals some of the misconceptions that exist around how a piece of art is made and the structures that keep those misconceptions intact, offering a telescopic view onto larger issues of ‘place’, equality of partnerships, sex and race.

The show includes works where it is difficult to tear apart who brought in what piece of the puzzle… by and for; Céline Condorelli, Denise Scott Brown, Elle Burchill, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Raoul De Keyser, James Langdon, John Baldessari, Jonas Mekas, Lucy Skaer, Margot Sandeman, Norman Laich, Paul Robbrecht, Robert Venturi, Simon Harlow, Jan-Philipp Hopf, Laura Kaminskaitė, and serves as a prefix of the methodologies and interests of Kunstverein’s new director Yana Foqué, who has followed up Maxine Kopsa since September of this year. The topic explored within this exhibition will extend into Kunstverein’s program of the following years.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, the Jonas Mekas Estate (Sebastian Mekas), Margot Sandeman Estate (Peter & David Robson), Ian Hamilton Finlay Estate (Pia Simig), Grimm Gallery (Sebastiaan Brandsen), Joan Hughson Gallery, Marian Goodman (Kristina Pallova, Lauren Sher), the Lithuanian Cultural Council and CAC Vilnius for their support.

Club Night #5
with Ola Vasiljeva, The Plant Orchestra, La Fureur de Vouivre & Bence Meijer

Take the night off and join us for our fifth club night on October 3 at 8pm with; a special soundtrack compiled by Ola Vasiljeva to a film by Mark Rappaport; a therapeutic listening session, as much as it is a dance, between Alexandra Duvekot and the flora surrounding her under the moniker The Plant Orchestra; a shamanic concert by La Fureur de Vouivre sculpting a dazzling weave of nature and technology evoking rhythms from their handmade flutes made from herbs and reeds. This is a NOT TO BE MISSED evening of concerts interlaced with songs selected by Bence Meijer (Haperende Mens) from his archive.

Note that this event will take place on location:

Cinetol, Tolstraat 182, 1074 VM Amsterdam
Entrance to the event is practically nothing (€6 normal price, €4 for Kunstverein members and neighbours of Cinetol)

Kunstverein thanks it (Gold)members for their continued support to our program. Together with Cinetol we also wish to thank Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stadsdeel Amsterdam Zuidoost and Volkshotel for their support to the Club Nights.

Salon Hang
13 September – 2 November 2019
Opening: 12 September, 7 pm

With:

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Neef Louis Design for their support.

Dear reader,

A little update concerning my KV residency:

I have initiated two little collaborations: with Maria Barnas and Joke Robaard. Me and Maria will work on two different strands of ekphrastic texts… One outlining potential “objects”, other one potential “plots”. I hope these texts propel me (or maybe us) into making sculptures based on them. Joke will come and take photographs after the 23rd of August (my mother’s birthday). As it stands now, Joke is free to do whatever she wants (and I’ll be supplying her with whatever she might need: models, props, equipment as long as there is a work of mine in the photograph… I’m feeding her bits of our text for ideas.

I also would like to do something with Femke de Vries, Toon Verhoef, Huib Haye van der Werf, Christopher Mahon and Joachim Robbrecht. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the notion of rehearsal and what this means for the project, to not much avail. Yet, as it stands now there is a bunch of us, an ensemble, gearing towards…what exactly?

I just want you to know that for the following 2 weeks until the end of the month I will be pulling all the strands together to see where I can knot them. I feel like I’ve been agitating something that will burst once I can align all the stars and the people involved. The exact dates will be more clear in the coming time. I will keep updating them on the Google Calendar, you can subscribe to it and follow along.

Take care for now,

Artun

AND THEN…

I listen, listen, listen, I listen and remember, that
everything I have to say, transforms

her* rhythm into
my speech.

Polyvibrations
Poly-vibrations
Po-ly-vi-bra-tions

All the time,
my story is evolving, interdependent and always alive**.

Kunstverein is happy to once more host Sandberg’s Fine Art Department’s annual Festival of Choices presenting ‘Collective Recollections’ by Tina Reden.

With ‘Collective Recollections’ Tina Reden zooms in on the task of listening and remembering as a strategy to break open the modern notion of a singular narrative and chronology. She explores the political possibility of polyphonic sound and imagines a collaborative world that connects voices through time and space. The exhibition will be open to the public daily from June 13 until June 16, between 12 and 6pm,

Additionally, on Saturday June 15, 1–4pm Reden, Francisca Khamis and Davide Sanvee invite you to take part in a workshop further exploring our collective memory based upon the sharing and mixing of stories by participants. The workshop offers an alternative experience of knowledge – not neutral, but plural – and in an interdependent relationship to others, allowing a passage, a crossing and intermingling between and across differences. To attend this workshop please announce your attendance to tina.reden@gmail.com (rsvp – max. 20 people)

Between 4–6pm following the workshop taking place on June 15, there will be a Public Moment with a chance to visit the exhibition in presence of the artist. Drinks will be served.

*‘Her’ as in the manifold, infinite other, in the middle of either or, ambiguous, threatening by the very ambiguity the orderliness of the system of schematized reality.
**This tekst was written by reverberating quotes by; Pauline Oliveros, Zora Neale Hurston, Fred Moten, Luisah Teish, Sun Ra, Maria Lugones,

Clubnight #4: What Am I Doing With My Life?
with Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, Jokūbas Čižikas, Indriði Arnar Ingólfsson, Géraldine Longueville and David Bernstein.

13 Juni, 9 pm
at Cinetol
Tolstraat 182
1074VM Amsterdam
€6 (€4 for Kunstverein members and neighbours of Cinetol)

Storyteller, performer, sculptor, illustrator, singer and pianist Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson roamed Europe in the past two year as a self-proclaimed M.D. with his traveling rap opera What Am I Doing With My Life? (W.A.I.D.W.M.L?) referencing the failures and perils of Western medicine.

Since then Styrmir has recorded an artist LP containing all the dark humoured rap songs and lullabies he composed on that tour together with his “Medical Faculty” (consisting of Jokūbas Čižikas, Indriði Arnar Ingólfsson, Jurgis Paškevičius, Thomas Myrmel, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Géraldine Longueville, David Bernstein, Anat Spiegel, Bergur Thomas Anderson, Arnar Ásgeirsson, Örn Alexander Ámundason, Hilmar Guðjónsson, Žygimantas Kudirka, Curver Thoroddsen).

The fourth edition of Cinetol and Kunstverein’s joined Club Night marks the Dutch release of this unique record and will be celebrated with a concert by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, Jokūbas Čižikas, Indriði Arnar Ingólfsson & David Bernstein. Géraldine Longueville will brew a special sage potion for the occasion to calm the nerves.

The record, which also contains a set of drawings made by Guðmundsson especially for each track, will be for sale on the Club Night for a reduced price of €35.

Kunstverein thanks it (Gold)members for their continued support to our program. Together with Cinetol we also wish to thank Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stadsdeel Amsterdam Zuidoost and Volkshotel for their support to the Club Nights.

Dear all,

It’s been a year in the making! And now:

Join us on Saturday 25 May, between 5 and 7pm, for the launch of Ginger&Piss #4: The Intern!

Ginger&Piss is published whenever we see fit and its remit is simple: to provide a platform for candid critique but at the same time allow the AUTHOR to stay hidden. The concept dictates that each contributor writes under a pseudonym and is offered full anonymity by the editors. This use of pseudonyms can be considered an answer to the cowardice of the art world, albeit a somewhat hypocritical one. ‘Loud’, ‘Gay’ and ‘Private’ were the themes of number 1, 2 and 3 respectively; Ginger&Piss #4 is dedicated to ‘The Intern’.
The Intern is guest edited by our two long term ‘interns’, Claes Storm and Mark Emil Poulsen, and offers a voice to the sorrows and sighs of various interns within their network. But the magazine doesn’t only look at the issue from bottom up! It also contains the voices of those who have guided interns and have come to regret their efforts.

JUICY STUFF!

To give voice to the anonymous authors Gabriel Lester will read Re: Ginger&Piss #4 by ___________, Andrea Wiarda will read The Pencil Sharpener by Roxana Rosenthal, Chris Evans will read Doing Time by Mads-Egil Petersen – Interluded by – Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons’ intern – Sophie de Seriere reciting The Magic of The Assistant I, II & III by The Great Illusionist.

But the fun doesn’t stop there!

One week later on Friday 31 May at 7 pm, we invite you to join us for the launch of Octopus of Offshoots, a Werkplaats Typografie publication edited by the custodians of Speelplaats year 19 – Adriaan Van Leuven and Oliver Boulton. Together they proposed a way of working through imitation. Imitation, not so much in the aspect of ‘copying’, but in the idea of chewing, digesting and regurgitating an existing thing. The outcome of these exercises that took place at WT throughout 2018 will be presented along with new contributions to the publication: a series of readings written or composed by Adriaan Van Leuven, Line Gry Hørup, Mariana Lobão, Oliver Boulton, Robert Milne and Tabea Nixdorff.

Delta Mityba
Dinners on 15, 16 and 17 May, 6.30–9pm
Hazenstraat 28
1016 SR, Amsterdam

When Gordon-Matta Clark approached Carol Goodden during her flower party in the spring of 1971 – where both the guests and the food came dressed in flowers – and suggested they start a restaurant she answered “OK” and FOOD was born. FOOD became famous not only because of the extremely good cuisine, introduced through its “Guest Chef Days”, it also became famous because it was the place where all the – now infamous – SOHO artists would meet and hang out.

Considering this, the similarities between FOOD and Delta Mityba aren’t too far apart. Like FOOD, Delta Mityba is a place where when you step in you are likely to run into a kindred spirit. Its founder, Robertas Narkus, fondly refers to the space as an “Artist Daycare Center.” The restaurant is located in a former Soviet canteen as a subset of the independent not-for-profit artspace Autarkia (also run by Narkus). As a space, it is an experiment of social engineering set up with the intention to create a model that would prove to be economically self-supporting, ringing true to its own name.

It’s a curious place where the practical constraints of nourishing bleed into artistic nurturing. Something that is not in the least absent from the many delicious dishes created by the chef Jonas Palenkas, who, among other things, serves Lithuanian interpretations of East Asian dishes – exclusively with seasonal products. The flavours this cheff curiously imagines come extremely close to the real thing and simultaneously are refreshing experimental reinventions of those cited flavours.

But Delta Mityba is more than a restaurant. It’s one of those places you normally only read about long after it has disappeared. It’s a social nook where there is time for new ideas to grow and take shape…made visible in the dishes, the handcrafted plates, the self-made and/or collected furniture, the designed lamps, the graphics and the artworks temporarily “stored” on their walls.

We will try to bring the essence of this fascinating corner of the earth a little bit closer and invite you to come to dinner on May 15, 16 or 17, daily from 6.30 until 9pm.

Reservations aren’t a necessity, but can be made by calling +31 657 92 76 81. For more information, prices and the menu please visit our website.

This marks the third episode in our attempt to occasionally turn into a restaurant and serve you both historical and contemporary delights (and dishes) by artists and collectives that have mediated their practices through the dinner, the restaurant, the produce. The first and second dinners in this series were, respectively, On a Ship by Grace Schwindt, and Riccetario Imaginato by Leone Contini.

You’re in a derelict wharf building. You lie outstretched on a balding lawn. You’re in a world of language and numbers and grids. You’re treading across a layer of unbroken snow. You’re on an escalator moving upward through a glass chute. You enter an empty courtroom. You arrive at a door. Your eyes open onto soft pink walls in a dimly lit bathroom barely larger than a coat closet. You remove all items from your pockets. You put your money in the slot.

Join us at POTTS this Friday, April 12 at *7PM sharp* for the launch of Second Thoughts: Selected Writings, an epic paperback compiling ten years’ of collected re-re-rewrites by Angie Keefer.

The author will be present, along with special guest, artist and renowned hypnotist Marcos Lutyens, who will perform a group hypnosis based on scripts originally composed by Keefer for The Hypnotic Show – an eyes-shut exhibition created by Lutyens and Raimundas Malašauskas – and republished in this new volume.

Refreshments will be served.

Second Thoughts: Selected Writings (544 pages) is designed by Scott Ponik and co-published by Plug In ICA. It follows Kunstverein’s earlier publication, Paper Exhibition: Selected Writings by Raimundas Malašauskas, as the second in a series of books featuring the work of one extraordinary author whose writing has never before been collected in a dedicated, single object. From Friday onward the book can also be ordered worldwide via Idea Books. €25 is its normal price, $20 at the launch!

^Angie Keefer is an artist and writer who lives in rural upstate New York. Lately, she makes desk visits at the Werkplaats Typografie and leads a seminar on artificial intelligence at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. You can find out more about her exhibition history, her looks, her many and varied professional accolades, and her untimely demise on the internet.

^Marcos Lutyens’s practice centers on the investigation of consciousness to engage at the mental as well as at the physical level. Investigations have included consciousness research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers, and urban designers. Marcos has exhibited internationally in numerous museums, galleries, and biennials, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); The Armory, New York (2017); and dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012). Recently his work has been included in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo and the Havana Biennial (2019).

POTTS
2130 VALLEY BLVD
ALHAMBRA, CA 91803
Los Angeles

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) Members, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, and Ammodo Fonds for their continued support of our program. We also wish to thank Werkplaats Typografie and POTTS for co-hosting this unique event.

Kunstverein goes wild at Studium Generale
Wednesday 27 March 2019
http://takeawalkonthewildside.rietveldacademie.nl/page/conference

• Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
  Museumplein 10
  1071 DJ Amsterdam

he’s reading The Cut, on Deciem CEO Brandon Truaxe’s psychotic breakdowns posted live on his Instagram feed just days before his passing and in the next browser has New York’s Sex Diaries open. But that’s not all, she’s also looking for corrective bikinis, new glasses and a not too boutiquish Spanish hotel, a cheap flight to Dubai, where she can get her new face cleanser, cheaper and at How To Get The Most Out Of Your Next Coaching Session. She’s got Nora Turato’s script the good, the bad and the viscose open and is switching back and forth between it and her browsers…. About halfway into the script of she reads:

she prefers thank you over sorry.

She stops all searches there.

Imagine that. Consistently choosing thank you instead of using sorry – what would it entail? She promises herself to contemplate that later while she pulls out Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Glamorama from her shelves, lays it on her glass desk and then decides to google it instead of go through the actual book. And even though she has to admit that her bedside table now holds very different literature (The Seven Spiritual Laws Of Success by Deepak Chopra, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, 21 Lessons For The 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari), she thinks about Victor, poor Victor who finds himself in the quake of his hazardous media-centred life unable to stop the rush of the transitory where pseudo-famous looks and acts the same as famous. And maybe that’s the difference between 1998 and 2019: there IS no difference anymore between pseudo and non-pseudo, there is no need for capitulation. We can swim through it. To speak with Harari: we’re beyond the ‘global stories’ we’re in the ‘Trump moment’ hand in hand with the ‘Brexit period’.
But still….
She says:
Take a deep breath.

Take the day as a remedy, a retreat, a parachute drop out of this frippery and these pseudo-fame trappings. Take this day as a day of experiences, involvements, encounters, occurrences, friendship, digital avoidances, first person accounts, parallel perceptions, alternative languages and song. ‘In waves and ribbons, and transitions, accompanied by silences and lights. A stroll’ with Alice Chauchat and Raimundas Malašauskas. Listening to time travel with Rosalind Nashashibi. Encountering ‘a misdirected weeping angel within a close proximity communication method’ hosted by Austin Redman with Darío Dezfuli and Heleen Mineur. Dancing, swaying and being involved in the occasion of Isabel Lewis. Topped emotionally with a ballad sung to you by Mark Buckeridge.

• Studium Generale Rietveld Academie this year takes place at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 27 until 30 March between 10 am and 5 pm. Entrance to the event is € 3,– (excl. museum entrance), Rietveld students and KV Members are admitted for free.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo for their support.

Club Night: Beyond the Desert, Do Ghosts Wither?

With Lucrecia Dalt, Love-Songs & Mitko Mitkov, Tintin Patrone & Orpheu de Jong
Invited by Phuong-Dan

20 March, 9 pm
at Cinetol
Tolstraat 182
1074VM Amsterdam

For this third edition of our monthly Club Night Hamburg based cultural anthropologist and DJ Phuong-Dan has selected a number of artists that through their practice will contemplate our (eurocentric) fascination for the foreign and explore both our glorification as well as our prejudices for the other, the unknown. The evening is a critical inquiry of our exotizing habits, of which the creation of stereotypes is one, but it is also an acknowledgment and acceptance of the foreign as a source of artistic inspiration. This ambivalence is approached in a diverse, playful way through; the musical contribution by Lucrecia Dalt, Orpheu de Jong, the band Love-Songs, a reading by Mitko Mitkov and an installation by Tintin Patrone.

These contributions do not want to provide an answer, but rather offer an illustration of how we can reflect critically, poetically and sometimes slightly dark humoured on our shared histories, routines and habits. Submerge yourself in a work made especially for this event by Tintin Patrone based on the popular Taiwanese Broadway musical from 2014 called ‘Fort Zeelandia’ depicting the Dutch presence in Taiwan, followed by a live performance of Lucrecia Dalt on the subject of Terra Nullius (No Man’s Land). After, Love-Songs will play a single one song titled Inselbegabung (Savant Syndrome) dealing with the phenomenon of someones extreme talent, in specifically one thing. Simultaneously, Mitko Mitkov will let us be part of his subjective imaginations of speculative islands. The evening will conclude with a listening set by Orpheu de Jong who will explore the topic by searching through his own collection of so-called Library Music – a genre which often categorizes music by continent, country or region and in doing so emphasizes the western construction and reduction of the faraway.

Phuong-Dan is a DJ based in Hamburg, Germany. For over a decade now he is both resident and host at legendary St. Pauli underground venue Golden Pudel Club. In addition, he works on a project-specific basis amongst others as a screenwriter, photographer and music curator.

Lucrecia Dalt dove into music full–time after working as a civil engineer in Colombia. Her pursuit of avant–garde sound brought her to Spain and then to Germany, where she currently resides. While highly technical, Dalt has always balanced the sharp mind of a methodical thinker with the restless heart of a passionate artist, gradually seeking a way to create handcrafted mental states through sound, maintaining a quantity of emotionality, merging accessible, melody with abstract structures, handcrafted effects and sampling. Her recent work develops around the ideas of repositioning fiction, time perception, scale, telluric effect, repetition, vocoding and sound dynamics.

TinTin Patrone is a German-Filipino multi-disiplinary artist who has worked as a composer, musician, actress, film and music producer, painter, performance artist and author. The connections between music, art, sound and experimental gesture is the general field TinTin Patrone is interested in. One focus of her creations lies on the visual elements of music, the tension between conceptual ideas and physical existence and how we relate to music individually and as a society. Her performances and installations include elements from musical Concept-Art, Fluxus and Social practice. Another important inspiration that informs her artistic practice is the culture of associations and clubs; she often performs with her orchestra or cooperates with other artists and collectives.

Love-Songs are Thomas Korf, Manuel Chittka and Sebastian Kokus. The trio has developed its own musical twist over the past few years. Different variations of Kraut music becoming an amalgamation of the heritage of German avant-garde pop music. Influences of Dub, Wave and Cosmic Music are obvious but rudimentary. The development of a new (musical) language is the primus of their work and finds a temporary climax on the recently released ‘Inselbegabung EP’ on Kame House Records.

Mitko Mitkov is a writer and publisher who lives and works in Hamburg. He is active in the fields of art and culture, initiating various projects mostly through his platform One%ofOne (oneofone-verlag.com).

Orpheu de Jong
Taking real pride and joy in unearthing and sharing his usually musical treats, Orpheu The Wizard is musically curious and invites his audiences to be so too. As versatile as he is eclectic, you are as likely to be floating in outer space one moment as you are rooted to a beat the next. Orpheu is a celebrated DJ known for the breadth and depth of his taste and the passion with which he plays. He is also the co-founder of Red Light Radio and the in house designer for Dekmantel.

Kunstverein thanks it (Gold)members for their continued support to our program. Together with Cinetol we also wish to thank Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stadsdeel Amsterdam Zuidoost and Volkshotel for their support to the Club Nights. A special thank you for this event goes out to the Goethe-Institut, Amsterdam and RE:VIVE, an initiative by Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid.

2 notebooks
ca. 250 recipes
1 World War
1 prisoner of war and great-uncle, Giosué Fiorentino
1 artist and great-nephew, Leone Contini
1 keeper/transcriber and niece, Annarita Caputo
2 Kunstvereins, Amsterdam and Milano
1 graphic designer, Marc Hollenstein
1 launch

Please join us on February 28 at 7.30 pm for the launch of Kunstverein’s most recent publication, Riccetario Imaginato (The Imaginary Cookbook). The launch will be held at Mangiassai (Ruyschstraat 42, Amsterdam) and is accompanied by a 3 course dinner with custom wines. Places are limited, so please book your seat in advance via office@kunstverein.nl.

Riccetario Imaginato contains 250 regional Italian recipes drawn from two small handwritten notebooks, marked “B98” and “Ricettario Culinare n. 2” (“Culinary recipe book no. 2”). These notebooks once belonged to Giosué Fiorentino, and were compiled by him and other Italian war prisoners in a German prison camp. They had been brought there after having been captured by the Austro-Hungarian and German armies during the 12th, and last, Battle of the Isonzo (also known as the Battle of Caporetto or rather, the most disastrous defeat in Italian military history). Writing down these recipes and discussing the right way to prepare certain dishes became a survival strategy for this group of men who were succumb by hunger.
            It is the first time that the recipes from the notebooks have been published in both Italian and English, alongside the reproductions of the original pages of the notebooks.

            Simultaneously this book marks the end of a number of imaginary dinners organised by Kunstverein Milano and Amsterdam – with real food – that took place at several locations and were orchestrated, commented on, and hosted by the great-nephew of Giosué Fiorentino, Italian artist Leone Contini. This dinner and launch will be the final chapter.

The dinner includes a starter, a main and a dessert, 3 glasses of wine, coffee or tea and… a free book!

Price: €45 for members / €55 for non members.

Kunstverein wishes to thank our (Gold) members, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK) and Ammodo. A special thank you goes out to Stadsdeel Oost for their support to this project!

Zapp Magazine Club Night with Kathe Burkhart, Sean Dower, Karl Holmqvist, Annika Ström stand-in and Cosy Camping.

20 February, 9 pm
at Cinetol
Tolstraat 182
1074VM Amsterdam

€6 (€4 for Kunstverein members and neighbours of Cinetol)

When was the last time you found yourself in a space where the ceiling was just a little bit too low, the music a little too loud, the drinks warm and everyone smoking, singing along to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ between breaths… Without wanting to bring out too much of the nostalgia, we would like you to join us for the second Club Night* hosted by Kunstverein, at Cinetol.

This time the event is centered around Zapp Magazine, a (initially) quarterly magazine on VHS videotape which allowed you to watch exhibitions from the comfort of your own couch. The parts you didn’t like you could fast-forward through, the ones you did you could watch on endless repeat. It was an initiative by Corinne Groot, Jack Jaeger, Arnold Mosselman and Rob van de Ven. With the help of correspondents from all over the world Zapp had eyes and ears everywhere and covered exhibitions, performances and… afterparties!

While you can binge-watch all the original tapes in the exhibition featuring the full Zapp Magazine archive at Kunstverein until March 16, we invite you to experience the performative work of a few artists featured in the video tapes, live on stage during our second Club Night at Cinetol on February 20.

With Kathe Burkhart (Zapp #0 &1) reading from xx, Sean Dower (Zapp # 3 & 4) introducing a new musique concrète composition titled 331/2, a performance by Karl Holmqvist (Zapp #3 & 4), a tentative appearance by Aernout Mik (Zapp #6 & 9), and a stand-in performance by xx of Annika Ström hit ‘I Don’t Know What to Sing’ guided by casio-piano. Cosy Camping will provide tunes before and after.

During the event we will also screen extra footage from the Zapp Magazine archive, including footage from Lothar Hempel’s Lotusclub, selected by Rob van de Ven en Corinne Groot to set the scene.

*Club Nights is a series of events in which we focus on artists who as well have a ‘lesser known’ musical practice, or vice versa, and invite them to share their work for one night in the small club setting of Cinetol.

Cinetol and Kunstverein wish to thank Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK) and Stadsdeel Zuid for their support to this program.

Zapp Magazine
26 January – 16 March 2019
Opening: 26 January, 7–8 pm (following the members only preview starting at 6 pm)

The New Body by Astrit Ismaili
8–15 December 2018
Opening: 7 December 2018

On Friday December 7, Astrit Ismaili will present their performance The New Body at Kunstverein. For The New Body, Ismaili designed a wearable musical instrument that challenges the biological body’s physical and mental capacities by adding to and changing natural (given) traits. The New Body underlines their ongoing engagement into body and gender politics, and their exploration of the human voice in relation to physical movement.

The performance starts at 7 pm sharp, but you can join us for a glass of Glühwein in front of our space from 6.30 pm. In the week following the performance, a ghostly hologram of The New Body will inhabit Kunstverein (on view during regular opening hours until December 15).

This performance has been made possible with the help of Mondriaan Fonds, LambdaLambdaLambda, Digital Spring, Salts, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Mr. Peanut
Opening 13 October, 6–8 pm
On view until 1 December

I would like to take this opportunity to endorse the candidacy of Mr. Peanut for mayor of Vancouver. Mr. Peanut is running on the art platform, and art is the creation of illusion. Since the inexorable logic of reality has created nothing but insolvable problems, it is now time for illusion to take over. And there can only be one illogical candidate – Mr. Peanut.
– William S. Burroughs

Mr. Peanut… Mr. Peanut…. we know what you’re thinking: not another white man in a peanut suit.

But it’s 1974.

(Again)

And he’s running for mayor.

And, imagine. Really. Close your eyes and picture it. He doesn’t speak, he taps, he poses, he passes.

2,684 people vote for the big tap dancing peanut.

What does this say about politics, then?

And – tell us honestly – when, just now, you closed your eyes, and you saw him not in black and white, but full color, with his cane and his top hat, could you imagine yourself NOW, today, tomorrow, going into that voting booth and with your big red pencil ticking off the box next to the name “Mr. Peanut”?

Tell us.

Mr. Peanut… Not just another nut in politics.

“Borderline Case” photo Morris/Trasov Archive

Vincent Trasov became Mr. Peanut in 1971. It all started when he was making drawings of Mr. Peanut tap dancing for a stop motion film for the cultural platform Intermedia, and, finding the task tedious, decided to make a life-sized costume instead, one in which he could simply tap dance himself, animating the real thing and skirting the drawing process. The name Mr. Peanut stuck.

He was in good company. Like many artists in Vancouver connected with the then recently founded art institution, The Western Front (founded in 1973 and ongoing), working with an alias became the norm. Michael Morris took on “Marcel Dot”, Glenn Lewis, “Flakey Rosehip”, Anna Banana became “Anna Banana”, Eric Metcalfe & Kate Craig were “Dr. & Lady Brute”, A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz & Jorge Zontal became “General Idea” and Chip Lord & Hudson Marquez from San Francisco were “Ant Farm”.

For many of these figures collaboration is crucial. Collaboration and a determined interest in “finding [their] own audiences of like-minded individuals.” This quest was made concrete in 1969 when Trasov and artist Michael Morris developed a decentralized artist network that aimed to connect and exchange with contemporaries, mainly in Canada and the US. They called it Image Bank. People like Ray Johnson, William S. Burroughs and Robert Filiou were inspirational and also supportive – in fact the name “Image Bank” was referenced from William S. Burroughs’ novel “Nova Express” (1964).

In a world serviced relentlessly through social media, Image Bank and Mr. Peanut’s urgency persists. Functioning as practices and methodologies, they remind us of how vital it is to continue to question and circumvent the existing establishments of both art and political institutions.

The exhibition Mr. Peanut traces the history of Trasov’s revolutionary alias and includes historical documents, publications, correspondence, video footage as well as more recent drawings of Mr. Peanut and paintings by Vincent Trasov. A major retrospective on Image Bank will follow in the summer of 2019 at Kunst-Werke in Berlin.

Mr. Peanut has been made possible by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and the Morris/Trasov Archive. Kunstverein wishes to thank the Belkin and their fantastic team, Scott Watson, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov.

Yesterday I heard someone speak on a podcast about Roger Ailes, the sinister strategist behind the success of Fox News (and the comeback of Richard Nixon), saying that Ailes’ insight was that if you provide them with “emotion, drama, and conflict,” the “people” will be yours: create non-stop emotion, drama, and conflict, and the society will replicate your presence through obsessive fixation, whether as supporters or detractors. In this sense, I’ve surely done my part to perpetuate the current insanity. And I think the play that’s in the back of the book is about this.

– Angie Keefer, in an email sent to Kunstverein on November 7, 2018.

Second Thoughts by Angie Keefer
25 November, between 3–5 pm

Kunstverein Publishing is happy to announce a new book by Angie Keefer titled Second Thoughts: Selected Writings 2008–2018. This book follows up on Kunstverein’s earlier publication Paper Exhibition: Selected Writings by Raimundas Malašauskas and embodies the second chapter in a series of publications that focus on bringing together the writings of one extraordinary author whose work has never before been collected in a dedicated single object. During the event we will be staging What Is What – a roundtable discussion among four “characters”; an artist, a professor, a political scientist, and a marketing executive (played by Mark Buckeridge, Annie Goodner, Gerardo Madera, and Angie Keefer), and a dramatic side character (played by Richard John Jones). This reading will start at 3.30 pm.

Second Thoughts: Selected Writings 2008–2018 is (now, at this very moment) being designed by Scott Ponik and, although the book will not be present at the time of the event, its wonderful author will.

C’était un rendez-vous
22 September, 9 pm
at Cinetol
Tolstraat 182
1074VM Amsterdam

€6 (€4 for Kunstverein members and neighbours of Cinetol)

From this autumn onward Kunstverein will set up five multidisciplinary evenings at Cinetol. The evenings will always explore a different intersection between art and music. This first evening we dedicate to C’était un rendez-vous, a short film by Claude Lelouch from 1976 that depicts one crazy, nearly nine-minute long (or short) ride through Paris. To shoot the film Lelouch mounted a camera on his Mercedes-Benz and drove like a mad man through the streets of Paris. In the beginning of the film the director notifies the audience that for this film “nothing was accelerated and no stunts were pulled” yet what he fails to mention is that, because he was unhappy with the sound of his own engine, Lelouch edited the engine sound of a Ferrari on top of his images.

Sound is quite often a subordinate to the viewing experience in most films, but a lot changes to that viewing experience when the score changes drastically. At the invitation of curator Yana Foque, No Age (Drag City), Jan Matthe (Für Dich Verlag) and Smari Runar Robertsson addressed this topic specifically. Each band made their own unique soundtrack for C’était un rendez-vous, which will be shown three times on the evening, each time with a different score.

No Age
No Age is an American noise-pop band from Los Angeles founded in 2006 consisting of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt. The band is closely linked to the so-called Smell scene based around the similarly called club where they provided bookings. The duo acts as conductors, shamans, catapults, roadies on record and in live situations, delivering the people reductive rock n roll inspired by bursts of energy. Cosmic radiation amplification, cancerous tunes, infectious feelings, overwhelming joy. Active since 2006 until now, and possibly until forever.

https://noage.bandcamp.com

Jan Matthé, together with Stacks
Jan Matthé from Antwerp is mostly known for his publications and mixtapes, which he releases as Für Dich Verlag. Lesser known are his beautiful synth compositions among which is “Musik Für Grottekinder 1 +2”, a tribute to Soothing sounds for babies made on the occasion of the birth of his niece. Together with his brother Sis he makes electronic pop music as Stacks. Of this soon the third album will be ready.

http://www.soundcloud.com/risikopress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbrLgbqHDP4

Smari Runar Robertsson
Smári Róbertsson (Iceland, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Amsterdam. In his work he examines location-specific phenomena and topographical characteristics, which he translates into written works, sound compositions and site-specific installations. Through his works we encounter objects that have not only been formed by history, but which owe their autonomy and existence to the incidental processes that occur in the background of our own lives. Together with Masaki Komoto he also forms the musical duo Mr. Music.

https://soundcloud.com/muldurmuldur
https://soundcloud.com/mrmusicinc

Cinetol and Kunstverein wish to thank Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK) and Stadsdeel Zuid for their support to this program.

Food, honestly, sometimes is the reason why we make it out of bed. We’ve finally taken the step into making this a more structural part of our program and turned our fascination into a proper series. Throughout the coming year, Kunstverein will occasionally turn into a restaurant overnight, serving you both historical and contemporary delights (and dishes) by artists and collectives that have mediated their practices through the dinner, the restaurant, the produce… For the first edition in the series we are proud to present On a Ship by Grace Schwindt, co-produced by perform doc*.

The dinner and performance will take place at Kunstverein on Friday 14 and Saturday 15 September at 8pm on both evenings. The entrance will be € 40, this will include a three course meal with customary wines. As there are only 15 seats available per evening, please make a reservation via office@kunstverein.nl before Wednesday 12 September.

On a Ship is a new composition which interweaves live interventions with text, voice, sculptures and costumes, created by Schwindt and performed by opera singer Francesca Pusceddu, with several dishes of food loved and chosen by the artist and prepared by culinary talent Nick Jaël Bruynen. In the course of the evening the work examines the relationship between language and the physical, language and the emotional, and explores what can happen if language and the voice are separated from each other at first, and then joined again.

Grace Schwindt (b. 1979, Germany) works not only across different themes and stories but also across different media. All of her works are connected by topics such as the fragility of the body, the importance of objects in the construction of memory and history, and the influence of capitalism on society. In 2018 Grace Schwindt will have a solo exhibition at Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose in Amsterdam. Her performance Opera and Steel, which premiered at the Kaaitheater in Brussels last year, was part of the Something Raw festival in Amsterdam in March this year.

*perform doc supports performing artists by documenting their artworks, proposing a tailored and open manner for the art world to deal with performances when exhibiting, re-enacting or including them in their collection, as well as when having documentation on those works in archive centers after the completion of the live act of a performance. To keep the project close to the liveliness of performance, we program performances by the artists who will take part in this initiative. perform doc* is supported by AFK and would like to thank Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose for their support to this evening.

Announcing……the winner of our first yearly Summer Residency: Dean Allen Spunt (No Age).

For three nights in August, Spunt will bring Succession Sounds, a program he has been organizing in a former drag club located in the San Fernando Valley (LA), to Amsterdam. On August 15, 22 and 29, from 8 until 11pm, the space will become the melting point for people who make music, who play music, who show films, make objects, who drink or don’t, who are curious experimenters and flaneurs, to come together for maximum enjoyment and confusion. With performances and work by:

Nicole Antonia-Spangola
Negashi Armada
EM
Sam Gordon
Matthew Clifford Green
Kate Hall
Bert Huygue
Dirar Kalash
Miaux
NM Studio
Oomboi Lauw
Zane Reynolds
Jacob Robichaux
Jess Scott
Suzanne Kraft
Martine Syms

The show can be visited on performance nights or by appointment only. The entrance fee for each performance night will be €5, to be paid at the door. Space is limited so we advise you to join us right from the start.

Kunstverein wishes it’s (gold)members, AFK and Ammodo for their ongoing support. Additionally we would also like give special thanks to Oedipus Brewing for their aid to this project.

Kunstverein is proud to share with you a complete set of twenty Dial-A-Poem records, published by Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS). We invite you to come and listen to them at the opening of the show DIAL +31 203 313 203 on Saturday 21 April, between 6 and 8pm.

“I certainly won’t curl up in a chair with a book of poetry.” — John Giorno

Dial-A-Poem was a technologically revolutionary poetry service thought up in the late 1960s by artist, activist and poet John Giorno. Inspired by a late night conversation with his friend William S. Burroughs and the recent avant-garde methodologies of (pop) artists like Andy Warhol, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Giorno created a new model for the distribution of poetry – one that would bring poetry to a larger audience, in a manner that steered away from fatigued traditions of formal readings (a dynamic that most often placed the poet on a page and the audience in a library).

Through his phone service callers would be connected to a web of 12 automatic answering machines and be randomly serenaded by the voices of over 70 artists, including Kathy Acker, Nick Cave, Patti Smith and Charles Bukowski. The selection of poems would change daily and often they would advocate urgent social issue of the time such as the Vietnam War, the Aids Crisis and the sexual revolution. When the phone lines got cut, Giorno moved on to distributing their poetry on vinyl. Under the GPS label he released albums regularly until the late 1980s. Many of these included early recordings by later prominent performers such as Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass as well as unique performances by Frank Zappa, Diamanda Galás, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage and many more.

It’s these albums we now hold in our collection and from April 21 until June 16 we welcome you to come and listen to them on a custom-made carpet designed by Physical Culture (Julie Héneault, Margaux Parillaud, Ursula Marcussen and Line-Gry Hørup).

During the course of the exhibition we will be hosting 3 Evenings on a Revolving Stage*. Three special events where readings will be hosted and shared. In analogy to the projects and with the purpose of distributing the show to as broad an audience as possible, making use of the various mediums at hand, a special radio show will be aired on Redlight Radio on May 28 between 9 and 10 pm. This broadcast, hosted by Yana Foqué and Jo Sandow, gives you the chance to listen to the Dial-A-Poem Poets from the comfort of your own home.

Or call us at +31 203 313 203.

* the title 3 Evenings on a Revolving Stage is borrowed from the similarly titled series of performance nights organised by Jean Depuy at the Judson Church in New York in 1976. To these evenings he invited artists that overlapped with the Dial-A-Poem Poets.

D
Κι αν στο έλεγα στη γλώσσα μου
Θα έπρεπε να κινηθείς στους μύες μου
Θα καλούσες εκεί που οι μύες μου σε θυμούνται
Μα στην δικιά σου, καμιά μνήμη δεν μένει

I
I’m afraid I forgot how to write, I forgot the fluidity of the rhythms of language. I’m afraid I even forgot how to spell the words and how to make them sound as consistent beings. It takes me seven minutes and one cigarette to write down three sentences. It takes one full stop. It takes one pause, one back and one play to start writing again.

During the course of the DIAL +31 203 313 203 show, featuring one of the keystone works by the visionary poet, activist, and artist John Giorno, Kunstverein is hosting a series of special evenings dubbed 3 Evenings on a Revolving Stage. This title is borrowed from a series of performance nights by the same name, organised by Jean Depuy at the Judson Church in New York in 1976, and lifts up a corner of what will be going on behind the curtain of Kunstverein’s backspace.

On June 7 from 8pm we give the floor to Danae Io and Ioanna Gerakidi who will be performing In The Current Of The Situation, a composition of oral stories and eroto-historiographies tracing the mnemonic representations of unrequited sentiments of eros, love, lust and desire. This email correspondence project is fragile, vulnerable, proximate, and intimate.

Again, the evening will be intersected with tracks from the Dial-A-Poem Records that criss-cross with the performance.

Serving: Drinks from the Lost in the Thrill of it All Bar, stocked with the favourite drinks of Bukowski, Burroughs, and Sexton.

As a part of the DIAL +31 203 313 203 show, focussing on the Dial-A-Poem service line set up by the activist and poet John Giorno in the late sixties, we are hosting a special radio show tonight between 9 and 10 pm on Redlight Radio. This broadcast will be hosted by Yana Foqué (curator at Kunstverein) and Jo Sandow (co-host Affiliated Station), and gives you the chance to listen to the Dial-A-Poem Poets from the comfort of your own home.

The show will feature the beatiful voices of:
Kathy Acker,
Laurie Anderson,
John Ashbery,
Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones),
Charles Bukowski,
William S. Burroughs,
David Byrne,
John Cage,
Nick Cave,
Diane Di Prima,
Ed Dorn,
Allen Ginsberg,
John Giorno,
Denise Levertov,
Frank O’Hara,
Charles Olson,
Patti Smith,
Diane Wakoski,

and many others featured on:
Disconnected,
Biting Off The Tongue Of A Corpse,
William S. Burroughs / John Giorno,
Totally Corrupt (The Dial-A-Poem Poets),
Big Ego,
Sugar, Alcohol, & Meat,
You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With,
Glenn Branca / John Giorno ‎– Who You Staring At?,
Life Is A Killer,
One World Poetry: Live From Amsterdam,
Lenny Kaye Connection ‎– I’ve Got A Right,
Better An Old Demon Than A New God,
A Diamond Hidden In The Mouth Of A Corpse,
Smack My Crack,
and Like A Girl, I Want You To Keep Coming.

Tune in!

As part of the DIAL +31 203 313 203 show, featuring the Dial-A-Poem project by the visionary poet and activist John Giorno, Kunstverein is hosting a series of open mic events dubbed 3 Evenings on a Revolving Stage. On May 24, June 7 and June 16 we invite everyone to join us and our special guests to read some poetry. This could be a horoscope, a message you received from a friend, the lyrics to a polular song,… in short, it can be whatever you consider poetry to be but, to level the ground, we ask you to only come to these events if you are willing to rise to the occasion.

Among the crowd at the first event on May 24, starting at 8pm, are Mia You (NL/US), Line-Gry Hørup (DK) and Andrea di Serego Alighieri (IT). You will present one of her newest poems to us, Hørup will introduce her publication on the controversial poet Rudolf Broby-Johansen and the never before translated work ‘Blod’, while di Serego Alighieri will lead us through the work of Charles Olson and the poetry of Denise Levertov, to a reading of an unpublished prose poem by Lyn Hejinian.

The evening will be intersected with tracks from the Dial-A-Poem Records and drinks to calm the nerves.

Presenting: Merchandise

#SlapIt #ProveIt #Swear #PutItOnSomething #ShowMe #kvmerch

A: Bean, I got the dankest shit on the planet it’s straight from colorado.
B: Shut the SHIBBY up bean!
A: Whoooooo!!! YEAAHHHHH! Whooooooo!
A: So I’ll meet you and then we’ll hit it.
B: Aight.
A: Yo, first lend me 20; you can hold this bike I just found.
B: DAAAAMMMMMMMNNNNNN he’s hot!
A: Bet.
B: Merch. It’s all about the merch.
A: No bet.
B: Ye.
A: First clean the car.

During the Hazenstraat Biennale, on five very special occasions Kunstverein presents its new MERCH. Join us on every Thursday in March, between 17–19h, for the launch of new piece made by Carla and Karlis, Sabo Day, Rudy Guedj, Marc Hollenstein, and Nora Turato.

This Thursday, March 1, we present the first item, a customized tote bag made by Rudy Guedj. For the occasion we offer a 20% discount on all Kunstverein books when buying a bag… Don’t miss out!

Now here’s a story.

While Joe Gibbons himself is landlocked, his exhibition Drawings from Rikers will open to the public at Kunstverein on Friday February 16, from 6–8pm (following the members only preview). And although Gibbons himself can’t join us in person for the night of the opening, we certainly hope you will.

The catalogAvailable at Kunstverein is the book Drawings from Rikers edited by Maika Pollack, designed by Almog Cohen-Kashi and published by Object Relations (2017). It contains all of Gibbons’ drawings from Rikers, an extensive interview with Tony Oursler, and an introduction by former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Andrew Lampert.

Evening screeningsAndrew Lampert has curated a selection of films by Joe Gibbons especially for Kunstverein, to be screened during the exhibition. More about location and dates will follow in a separate invitation. So keep your eyes open!

Joe Gibbons’ work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. His work has been chosen for the Whitney Biennial in 1993, 2000, 2002 and 2006, and is regularly programmed at the NY Video Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. His films have been broadcast in Spain, France and Germany as well as on PBS. He has collaborated on performances, films and videos with artists Tony Oursler, Karen Finley, Tony Conrad, and Emily Breer.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo for their support, and sends a special thank you to the artist, Maika Pollack (Southfirst Gallery, New York), Andrew Lampert and, of course, the Friends of Joe Gibbons.

We’re back, and kicking off the year with Amsterdam’s very first Artist Trading Card Fair (ATCF) happening Saturday 20 January, from 3 to 5pm. ATCF is initiated by Lotte Schröder, after having had a conversation with Anna Banana – whose extensive collection of Trading Cards is currently on view at Kunstverein.

Artist Trading Cards are miniature works of art created on 65 x 90 mm cardstock. They are original editions and, most importantly, self-produced. The idea, launched by Vänçi Stirnemann in April 1997 at INK.art&text (Zürich), is that you trade your cards – much like baseball cards – for others, with others.

Inspired by Anna’s collection and the simplicity and generosity of the idea, Schröder set out to make her own set of 9 cards. For the last day of Anna Banana’s exhibition, Schröder, in collaboration with Kunstverein, invited a.o. Juliaan Andeweg, Maria Barnas, Yael Davids, Constant Dullaart, Uta Eisenreich, Peggy Frank, Jennifer Tee, Sara van der Heide, David Jablonowski, Germaine Kruip, Laura Pappa, Florian and Michael Quistrebert, Ola Vasiljeva, Gabriel Lester, Freek Wambacq, Felicia von Zweigbergk, Maria Pask, Natalia Rebelo, Minne Kersten, Rudy Guedj, Nerijus Rimkus and Johannes Schwartz to participating in this ATC moment.

As a visitor you are invited to come take a look at the different sets-of-nine, that will be traded off and to come celebrate the new year.

Dear People:

The following material is intended to help you to increase the quality of your life; some are funny, some are serious, some are tasteless, some are ridiculous, but they are, each in their way, helpful.

If you do not wish to continue to receive this stuff, too bad. Comments welcome, nevertheless. Please feel free to forward this.

Until then,
Seth.

The Joke Book: Collected by Seth Sieglaub, p. 13

Come test your smiles and Ha-Has, and join us for holiday drinks and jokes on Friday 15 December between 5 and 7 pm, for the official launch of The Joke Book: collected by Seth Siegelaub. The amazing (and funny) Marja Bloem will give an introduction to the publication.

The Joke Book is the first printed edition of the complete jokes & messages file that was found on Seth Siegelaub’s computer by his partner Marja Bloem. It contains jokes, quotes and pieces of advice, that Seth Siegelaub collected since 1999 and regularly redistributed via email amongst his friends.

With contributions by: Alex Alberto, John Baldessari, Marja Bloem, Myrna Bloom, Martin Browne, Alan Kennedy, David Kunzle, Joel Miller, Loren Miller, Kay Robertson, Laurent Sauerwein, Seth Siegelaub, Joan Simon, Kira Simon-Kennedy, Peter Sinclair, Steven Wright; and an introduction by Huan Hsu (written after a long conversation with Marja Bloem).

To Whom It May Concern:

Anna Banana is a project that explores the historical and contemporary implications of mail art and highlights a unique approach to humour, disguise, and the democratic potential of print media and critique. The show will feature Anna Banana’s artist stamps, mailers, postcards, posters, and costumes made over a forty-five year period.

Anna Banana is a historical overview, yet an urgent and contemporary response to our current socially saturated and mediated world. It a meaningful show for Kunstverein, that continues our co-operation with significant Canadian conceptual artists (Kunstverein worked with Glenn Lewis in the past and will work with Image Bank in the near future.)

Kara Hamilton, founding director of Kunstverein Toronto, has initiated this important retrospective of Anna Banana’s long art practice.* The exhibition will travel from Toronto to Amsterdam in October.

There will be an artist walk-though and preview (members only) at 5 pm prior to the official opening on October 21st at 6 pm.

Anna Banana runs until January 13th 2018.

Sincerely,

Kunstverein, Amsterdam

*Following in the mighty footsteps of Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Open Space Arts Society (2015), Pratt Institute Libraries (2016)

After four days of hard networking and business card exchanging, join us on Sunday 26 November at 4 pm, for the presentation of the almost entirely sold out:

Oracles. Artists’ Calling Cards
Edited by Pierre Leguillon and Barbara Fédier

Serving: Poor Man’s Champagne

Artist Pierre Leguillon and independent curator Carrie Pilto will present the book and discuss the phenomenon of calling cards, which lay the foundations for a micro-history of social networks formed before the advent of Facebook.

This event is organized by Temporary Gallery. Centre for contemporary Art e.V., Cologne and hosted by Kunstverein.

Oracles presents 123 calling cards of artists from the 18th century to the present day, facsimiled and inserted into the publication. Oracles follows the history of the calling card, the social context in which it was produced, and related historical narratives.

The carded artists include:
Absalon, Anni and Josef Albers, John Armleder, Iain Baxter, Larry Bell, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Binder, Max Bill, Pierrette Bloch, Rosa Bonheur, Irma Boom, Aglaüs Bouvenne, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Broodthaers, Antonio Canova, Caran d’Ache, A.M. Cassandre, Chenue malletier, Iris Clert, Claude Closky, Le Corbusier, Silvie Défraoui, Sonia Delaunay, Fortunato Depero, Marcel Duchamp, A.R. Dunton, Céline Duval, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Yan Duyvendak, Daniel Eatock, Edward Fella, Sylvie Fleury, Schwestern Flöge, Piero Fornasetti, Hans Frank, Lene Frank, Emile Gallé, General Idea, Dan Graham, Wolfgang von Gœthe, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Walter Gropius, Guerrilla Girls, Hector Guimard, Friedrich Haeffcke, Raymond Hains, Keith Haring, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Anton Herrgesell, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Ray Johnson, Ana Jotta, Wassily Kandinsky, André Kertész, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Klee, Johann Adam Klein, Yves Klein, Július Koller, Joseph Kosuth, Yayoi Kusama, Carl Gotthard Langhans, Fernand Léger, Pierre Leguillon, George Maciunas, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Edouard Manet, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Karel Martens, Annette Messager, Lucia Moholy, Piet Mondrian, Valérie Mréjen, Félix Nadar, Isamu Noguchi, The Offices of Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince and al., Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Francis Picabia, Adrian Piper, Emil Pirchan, Man Ray, Les ready made appartiennent à tout le monde®, Carl August Reinhardt, Gerrit Rietveld, Auguste Rodin, Edward Ruscha, Alexander Search, Willem Sandberg, Erik Satie, Gino Severini, Johan Gottfried Schadow, Egon Schiele, Oskar Schlemmer, Käthe Schmidt, Roman Signer, Alec Soth, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Jack Smith, Hélène Smith, Harald Szeemann, Sophie Taeuber, Karel Teige, Oliviero Toscani, Theo van Doesburg, Roman Vishniac, Andy Warhol, Weegee, Neill Whistler, Heimo Zobernig, Piet Zwart, Emmy Zweybrück Prochaska

With texts by:
Samuel Adams, Damarice Amao, Daniel Baumann, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Géraldine Beck, Paul Bernard, Christian Besson, Christianna Bonin, Véronique Borgeaud, Marie de Brugerolle, Garance Chabert, Kyrill Charbonnel, Yann Chateigné, Manuel Cirauqui, Chiara Costa, Caroline Coutau, Jean-Baptiste Delorme, Carla Demierre, Dakota DeVos, Corinne Diserens, Eva Fabbris, Patricia Falguières, Arthur Fink, Sophie Gayerie, Kati Gegenheimer, Mark Thomas Gibson, Nicolas Giraud, Victor Guégan, Andrea Gyorody, Nastassja Haidinger, Dean Inkster, Aurélie Jacquet, Elisabeth Jobin, Vincent Jolivet, Moritz Küng, Angela Lampe, Charlotte Laubard, Anaël Lejeune, Quentin Lannes, Pierre Leguillon, Charlotte Magnin, Nicole Marchand-Zañartu, Valérie Mavridorakis, Aurélien Mole, Michael J. Moore, Adrien Mouginot, Christiane Mühlegger, Émilie Parendeau, Ying Sze Pek, Corine Pencenat, Mathias Pfund, Fabien Pinaroli, Raphaël Pirenne, Paulo Pires do Vale, Carrie Pilto, Frans Postma, Jeanne Quéheillard, Fabienne Radi, Ivan Ristić, Vincent de Roguin, Paul-Louis Roubert, Margot Sanitas, Gilles Saussier, Elana Shapira, Klaus-Peter Speidel, Friedrich Tietjen, Rebecca Topakian, Gesine Tosin, Xiaoda Wang, Christophe Wavelet, David Zerbib, Célia Zuber

Oracles. Artists’ Calling Cards
Softcover, 320 pages, 123 color plates
20 x 26.5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-906803-16-6
Published by Edition Patrick Frey, 2017
Out of print, last three copies available at the event

2016 has passed, but some of its (political) diseases still linger…
Time to get to the heart of the problem…
Time for an alternative cure…
      Please join us on September 8 and 9 for the opening of Kunstverein’s new season and the Dutch premiere of Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson’s performance What Am I Doing With My Life?

What Am I Doing With My Life? is a traveling opera, a rap show and a comic routine combined, that deals with the subjects of (alternative) medicine, general health and death. The map for this touring performance takes on the shape of a body, with each European city on its path representing a different part in need of medical assistance.
      Aid and relief is given to its Amsterdam audience by self-proclaimed Doctor, Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, with the help of local collaborators: Indriði Arnar Ingólfsson, David Bernstein, Géraldine Longueville, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Anat Spiegel, Thomas Myrmel and Annabelle von Girsewald (as tour manager).

●
On Friday September 8, at 7 pm the action starts with crystal tears, Mayan death flutes and lullabies performed within an architectonic intervention by Hreinn Fridfinnsson.

Serving herbal elixirs.

●●
One day later, on Saturday September 9 at 7 pm, the performance is repeated, but with a twisted end: a boom box-amplified procession, on bikes, leaves from Kunstverein and slowly crawls across Amsterdam to end at David Bernstein’s opening of Because Most of the Cosmos is Compost (Thinging Part V) at P/////AKT.

The performance on Friday is a members only event. Due to its specific context, space is limited. We advise you to arrive early on Friday and/or (on bike) Saturday.

Tabula Rasa
Smári Runar Róbertsson
21–25 June 2017
Opening: 22 June 2017, 17:00–19:00

Join us this Thursday June 22 at 5pm for the opening of Tabula Rasa by Smári Rúnar Róbertsson, as part of the Festival of Choices … This Thursday, June 22, join us for the the opening of Tabula Rasa at 5pm – as part of festival of choices – by Smári Rúnar Róbertsson … As part of festival of choices, join us for Smári Rúnar Róbertsson’s Tabula Rasa opening Thusrday June 22 at 5pm …Tabula Rasa, by Smári Rúnar Róbertsson, as part of the Festival of Choices, this Thursday at 5pm. Join us …

Tabula Rasa marks the end the start or reshuffle of Smári’s catalogue of works. During the build up of the exhibition Smári is trying to “touch the near future with a really long stick”. He is trying to grab hold of a condition that changes constantly and will keep progressing during his time spend at Kunstverein. His works are will become visual visceral metaphors for intangible things, “sweeping across your face at the speed of a second-hand. ”

The exhibition will run from Wednesday June 21 until Sunday June 22, during regular opening hours (1–6pm). The opening will take place on Thursday between 5 and 7pm.

Serving: Icelandic delight (Mamma kaupa brennivín)

Tabula Rasa is part of A Festival of Choices, Master of Fine Arts Graduation 2017, Sandberg Instituut, 21–25 June 2017, various locations throughout Amsterdam. A Festival of Choices emphasizes upon the relationship and choices made between the graduating student and the diverse range of institutions and organizations offered within the cultural landscape of Amsterdam. For more information and the full program, please check www.festivalofchoices.nl

Please feel welcome to join us on Saturday 3 June, at 5pm for the launch of Kunstverein‘s sporadic in-house magazine Ginger&Piss. With a musical intermezzo by Smári Runar Róbertsson*

Serving: Highball

Kunstverein’s in house magazine is a cross between an academic journal and a darts club newsletter. Ginger&Piss (the name is a misquotation of Laurence Weiner) is published whenever we see fit, each issue containing a limited amount of contributions that vary in length according to the subject matter at hand. Loud and Gay where the themes of number 1 & 2, respectively; Ginger&Piss 3 is dedicated to Privacy.

The remit of Ginger&Piss is simple; to provide a platform for candid critique but at the same time allow the AUTHOR to stay hidden. The concept dictates that each contributor writes under a pseudonym; the use of pseudonyms can be considered an answer to the cowardice of the art world, albeit a somewhat hypocritical one.

*and one final installment to this Salon Hang by Nerijus Rimkus. We’re happy to announce that since our opening we have added works by the following members: Christine van Royen, Frits Bergsma, Angelo Tromp, Gijs Stork, and Maria Barnas.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo for their support.

“In 2012, I was invited to the Facebook group ‘Hey, Let’s Hang Out in Parks, etc…’ There were 31 members and a total of 2 posts – 4 days apart – in May 2012. I think I went to a BBQ because of it? – It didn’t work out that great first time around but I’d like to give it another try.”

secret handshakes,
inside jokes,
short and long term encounters,
awkward situations,
and staged social events

Please join us on Monday, May 29, at 5pm for Lieven Lahaye’s joyful start of his week long Salon-Hang-Hang-out: Hey, Let’s Hang Out in Parks, etc…

Serving: Vin des Amis

Hey, Let’s Hang Out in Parks, etc… is Lieven Lahaye’s first long term performance piece, focusing on situations and what it evokes if, for instance, “a friend visits you at work”. The series of illustrious meetups will take place in and around Kunstverein, weaving through the city – and Kunstverein’s program – a number of interventions at various locations, starting Monday May 29 at Kunstverein (Hazenstraat 28, Amsterdam).

Hey, Let’s Hang Out in Parks, etc… is open to everyone, but subscription is necessary. Kunstverein members receive priority. You can subscribe to the series by sending an e-mail to lieven@kunstverein.nl with subject line ‘hey’ to receive the program and daily updates.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo for their support.

A Novelistic Simulation Of An Everyday Space –
A treatise on style.

17–21 May 2017

Nathan Azhderian
David Bernstein
Hreinn Friðfinnsson
Susanna Hoikkala
Johan Jensen Kjeldsen
Richard Kostelanetz
Børge Morgensen
Jo Niemeyer
Laura Pappa & Ronald Pihlapson
Florian & Michael Quistrebert
Nicholas Riis
Karen Sargsyan
Lycke von Schantz
Bert Scholten
Ikea of Sweden
Jay Tan
Ilmari Tapiovaara
Nora Turato
Frits Vanèn
Ola Wihlborg
Geo Wyeth
Ran Zhang
Bruno Zhu

Amsterdam Art Fair
Kunsthal Koper, Huidekoperstraat 28
Around the corner from De Nederlandsche Bank

Wed May 17preview and opening
Thurs May 1811–19
Fri May 1911–21
Sat May 2011–19
Sun May 2111–17

Please join us for the book launch of Hand Reading Studies by Valentina Desideri, Friday May 19, from 5 pm onwards.

Hand Reading Studies is a collection of conversations, readings and writings that proliferated from A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff, an exhibition by Valentina Desideri that took place in Kunstverein, Amsterdam from 23 May to 25 June 2015.

For A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff Desideri transformed Kunstverein’s space at the Gerard Doustraat into a Studio – a place that generates knowledge through different modes of being together. Throughout the exhibition, Desideri invited participants as well as visitors to gather for readings and in study. The Studio – and its bar – were open for readings during Kunstverein’s regular opening hours and punctuated by weekly contributions to the study by the invited guests and artists.

The publication we are presenting now picks up where the project left off, bringing together a variety of materials and publications that were generated in or reverberated from the Studio, with contributions by Dr. Charlotte Wolff, Anthony Blunt, Céline Condorelli, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jessica Warboys, Jason Dodge, Mia You, Christian Hawkey, Annick Kleizen, and Valentina Desideri.

In the framework of Salon Hang Desideri will reactivate the Studio for the duration of one afternoon. Desideri will be joined by fellow readers Mia You and Annick Kleizen to provide readings and/or experiment on possible ways of reading whatever question, object, text or crisis anyone would need a reading for. You are equally welcome to join as a reader or to pose a question.

The readings begin at 5 pm and at 7 pm the book will be launched, with readings and drinks.

Please join us this Sunday 23 April, between noon and 9pm, for the third edition of Spring Performance Festival (SPF): a block party festival of performances at Cinetol Theater, Library (OBA) & Tolbar (Tolstraat 160–182, Amsterdam). Reservations are not required. FREE entrance (donations accepted).

With Performances/ interventions by, in order of apperance, Dr. Holobiont and the Lichens, niv Acosta, Johannes Büttner, Bruno Zhu, DYNASTY HANDBAG, and Geo Wyeth.

For more information + timetable go to:
www.kunstverein.nl/SPF2017
facebook
instagram

SPF is an initiative by Galerie Juliette Jongma & Kunstverein, Amsterdam in collaboration with De Ateliers, and organized by Jeanine Hofland.

SPF is generously supported by the Municipality of Amsterdam, Stadsdeel Zuid Special thanks to OBA, Cinetol. Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold)members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo.

Salon Hang
9 April – 10 June 2017
Members preview: Saturday 8 April 6 pm
Opening: Saturday 8 April 7 pm

Kunstverein: “See something that means something.”

It’s time to renew our vows.
Start fresh.
Re-kindle.

We’re not going to Hawaii. We’re staying in Amsterdam, but we’re holding the ceremony at our new location. We enter together the pink and blue living room of a Hollywood ex-porn star. Think gold, shag, keyboards, candles; think domestic pleasures, salon tenderness.

Welcome to this year’s members-only Salon Hang.

Ed van der Elsken, Taipeh (poster), 1973. Nederlands Fotomuseum. © Ed van der Elsken. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery.

Please join in a feast of you and your things; your pictures, objects, books, magazines, records, vases, pieces of strange cutlery, odd watches, paintings, and anything zebra. In a place transformed into a plush, domestic residence where one can sit and listen to live music, recitals, poetry readings, and drink and talk amidst a variety of artworks.

Kunstverein’s Salon Hang “brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.” (Andy Warhol)

Salon Hang marks a very special time of year: the time to celebrate its members*. Please welcome, amongst others: Gediminas Akstinas, Maria Barnas, David Bernstein, Marja Bloem, Ansuya Blom, Tim Braden, Sarah Crowner, Valentina Desideri, JL Diantus, Experimental Jetset, Maartje Fliervoet, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Laurent-David Garnier, gerlach en koop, Melissa Gordon, Roos Gortzak, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Rudy Guedj, Kara Hamilton, Will Holder, Marc Hollenstein, Juliette Jongma, Mathew Kneebone, Germaine Kruip, Lieven Lahaye, Jungmyung Lee, Gabriel Lester, Glenn Lewis, Matthew Robert Lutz-Kinoy, Raimundas Malašauskas, SL Martinez, Mevis & Van Deursen, Maureen Mooren, Lisa Oppenheim, Will Peck, Adam Pendleton, Michael Portnoy, Alexander Ramselaar, Nerijus Rimkus, Smári Runar Róbertsson, Scott Rogers, Christine Roland, Benjamin Roth, Beatrix Ruf, Glenn Ryszko, Lotte Schröder, Maaike Schoorel, Dexter Sinister, Gijs Stork, Claes Storm, Berend Strik, Jay Tan, Angelo Tromp, Nora Turato, Andy Warhol, Felix Weigand, Wieske Wester invited by Dürst Britt Mayhew, Riet Wijnen, Robert Wilhite, Luc Windaus, Geo Wyeth, Bruno Zhu …

Piss On The Electric Fence – Smári Róbertsson

*Kunstverein is a space that crosses culturally varied ground, on an intimate, ambitious, and domestic level. Kunstverein is a not-for-profit organization, which, through the support of its members, creates a community that endorses a distinct program. By being a member of Kunstverein you stake a claim to wanting to “see something that means something.” As a member, you participate in KV’s program, receiving priority for limited seating at events, special previews, access to members only happenings (like Salon Hang), discounts on publications, and other cultural benefits.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold)members and we are extremely happy to announce the support of Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, as well as Ammodo.

Reader,

Please join us for the launch of Reader, aantekeningen exemplaar, Werkplaats Typografie’s newest publication, on Saturday March 25 at 7pm. Along with the presentation of this new publication, seven special annotated versions with personal revisions and notes by Wigger Bierma, Malin Gewinner, Marijke Hoogenboom, Koen Kleijn, Andrea di Serego, Riet Wijnen and the editors themselves, will be introduced during the evening. Serving: Chameleons.

As part of Speelplaats, a parallel program of Werkplaats Typografie, participants challenged what was being offered in the school’s curriculum by introducing improvements or suggesting alternatives. Reader, aantekeningen exemplaar brings together these contributions made to the Speelplaats program alongside other like-minded initiatives by participants, guests and tutors in the shape of examples as well as reference texts and other materials. The reader borrows its title from an annotated copy of the catalogue Ruimtelijk Werk (1983), found in the library of Werkplaats Typografie, in which Wigger Bierma had penciled down what could have been done more consistently or what was lacking in his original design.

The reader was edited and designed by Nerijus Rimkus and Ronja Andersen with the support of Maxine Kopsa and contributions by Ronja Andersen, Danielle Aubert, Joel Colover, Valentina Desideri, Jason Dodge, Olya Domoradova, Paul Elliman, Rosie Eveleigh, Eloise Harris, Sarah Käsmayr, Maxine Kopsa, Raimundas Malašauskas, Robert Milne, Josse Pyl, Nerijus Rimkus, Charlotte Taillet, Maud Vervenne and Caroline Wolewinski.

The Werkplaats Typografie (WT) is part of the ArtEZ University of the Arts.

Kunstverein is extremely thankful for the support of its (Gold) members and the support of AFK and Ammodo.

Please join us on Friday March 3rd at 7 pm for Female Genius: an imagined conversation between Eva Kenny and Melissa Gordon on the past, present and future of Female Genius. With a reading by Melissa Gordon, followed by a Q&A.

Female Genius is the second launch of the book Painting Behind Itself. This publication was made on the occasion of Gordon’s exhibition at Vleeshal in 2016, and includes the essay “Painting Behind Itself” by Eva Kenny and an interview between Roos Gortzak and Melissa Gordon.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Stadsdeel Zuid, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Ammodo.

Noa Eshkol
I Look at the Moon and Think about My Daughter-in-Law
4 February – 19 March

A joint solo exhibition at Vleeshal and Kunstverein

Kunstverein
Hazenstraat 28, 1016 SR
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Member’s preview & walk-through at Kunstverein: February 3, 5 pm
Film screening at Kunstverein: February 4, 4 pm

When looking closely at a hand turning a doorknob, a “rotary movement” is observed, very different from the motion one would witness of jumping jacks, which are considered the result of a “plane movement,” and certainly unlike the perceived effort of a waist circling inside a hula-hoop. How do we define one movement from the next, and how do we preserve them in time, in order perhaps to redo them one after the other?

Kunstverein, together with Vleeshal (Middelburg), is excited to present a joint solo exhibition in two parts: ‘I Look at the Moon and Think about My Daughter-in-Law’ – on the work and thinking of contemporary dancer, choreographer, carpet maker and theorist Noa Eshkol (IL, 1924–2007).

In the 1950s, Noa Eshkol, together with architect Avraham Wachman, developed a notational system for movement, which uses a combination of symbols and numbers to define the motion of any limb around its joint. The Eshkol Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) system, named after its developers, was born out of a social practice and way of life, as much as it was a visual means of representing (human) motion. The system offers a way of looking at the movements of the body, by organizing them in relatively simple categories making it possible to notate and thus reactivate motion, precisely and mathematically, at a later time.

Please join us on Saturday February 4 for the opening of ‘I Look at the Moon and Think about My Daughter-in-Law.’ There, the first copy of the EWMN system will be on view, as well as a generous selection from the historic archives (curated by Maya Pasternak with research assistance by Mor Bashan). Kunstverein will also present the first ever screening of an early performance by the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group exercising the system. And a chameleon balancing on a branch.

The films will be screened on the window of Kunstverein’s storefront in the heart of the Jordaan, enabling both viewers inside and outside the space to be engulfed by the hypnotizing dances. Drinks will be served.

The exhibition will be open Thursday to Saturday 1–6 pm or by appointment from 4 February to 19 March 2017.

The exhibition at Vleeshal opens with performances by The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group on January 21, at 5 pm and workshops takes place on January 22. For more information on how to attend the workshops please visit www.vleeshal.nl

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Stadsdeel Zuid, and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, and Ammodo as well as the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation and Anja Casser for their foundational work on the previous exhibition of Noa Eshkol’s Wall Carpets and archival material which took place at the Badischer Kunstverein, Germany.

Kunstverein during Amsterdam Art Weekend
24–27 November 2016

We are pleased to invite you to the numerous events happening at Kunstverein this week:

On Thursday at 3.30 pm we will give Amsterdam Art Weekend a first shot – literally. Kunstverein has invited artist L-D Garnier to prepare a work that is a drink, one that embodies the season, in spirit. This limited edition piece, entitled AFTERNOON AUTUMN, will be available for free but dispensed at our discretion, only during Amsterdam Art Weekend.

And…

On Saturday between 5–7 pm, we host Kunstverein Toronto. In the good company of the artist, editor and designers, you are welcome to join us for the launch of Collection/Correction, a publication that for the first time brings together the writings of Andrew James Paterson (Toronto, 1952). Collection/Correction is anchored upon a series of new and recent poems, but also includes four of Paterson’s fictocriticism texts that were published in IMPULSE magazine between 1980 and 1989 and the scripts from Paterson’s videos: The Walking Philosopher (2001), Eating Regular (2004), 12 x 26 (2008) and Passing (2013). The book is co-published by Kunstverein Toronto and Mousse Publishing, edited by Jacob Korczynski and designed by Laura Pappa & Lotte Lara Schröder (more information here: http://www.kunstverein.ca/).

Also!

Sorry! NO We Don’t Do REQUESTS, is our ongoing exhibition of twenty years of Will Holder’s work with publications, talks, printed matter, and teaching, requested in nine week-long presentations by nine different guests and shown at Kunstverein. This week, Maxine Kopsa, a guest in her own home, has requested a full house and a lost speech. Her generous visuals will be on display from Thursday until Sunday, during AAW opening hours (see below).

Please note:

Kunstverein will be open during Amsterdam Art Weekend on: Thursday 24 November from 1–6 pm; Friday 25 November from 1–10 pm; Saturday 26 November from 12–8 pm; and Sunday 27 November from 12–6 pm.

Collection/Correction is published with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Andrew James Paterson and Jacob Korczynski gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of their travel to launch Collection/Correction.

‘A Clocktower in the Eye’
By Alex Waterman

Kunstverein is excited (and proud) to announce a special one night only performance deep in the South of Amsterdam.

On Thursday November 17, at 7.30 p.m. please join us in the midst of the Beatrix Park in the historic and monumental Kunstkapel, to listen to a set of compositions by Alex Waterman that explore the relationship between musical composition and the social construction of landscapes, whilst simultaneously searching for a place in and outside of these landscapes for the feelings that constitute us whilst always already undoing us: grief, loss, and desire.

Special location: Kunstkapel, Pr. Irenestraat 19, 1077 WT Amsterdam
Doors open at 6.30 p.m. performance starts at 7.30 p.m.
Tickets are €5 for non-members; members go free
Please reserve your tickets via office@kunstverein.nl.

Alex Waterman is a composer, performer, and scholar based in New York. His pieces are composed from found sounds and field recordings, often played back and re-recorded through early forms of recording devices and media (phonographs, homemade Berliner gramophones, cassette tapes, micro cassettes, etc.) or by attaching transducers to the back of the corpus of his instrument – transforming the cello into another speaker in the room.

Alex studied cello with Andor Toth, Catherina Meints, George Neikrug, and Frances Marie Uitti. He was a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London. In New York he has performed and recorded extensively with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians and artists such as Robert Ashley, Helmut Lachenmann, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Ned Rothenberg, Elliott Sharp, Miya Masaoka, David Watson, Chris Mann, George Lewis, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, Beatrice Gibson, Peter Gordon, Ned Sublette, Elio Villafranca, Shannon Ebner, Wayne Koestenbaum, Amy Sillman, Michael Schumacher, and E.S.P. TV. His installation works have been exhibited at the ICA London, Stonescape, Vilma Gold, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Printed Matter, the Bonnefantenmuseum, and the Whitney Museum. His book on Robert Ashley, written and edited by Waterman and Will Holder, was released by New Documents in September 2014. He has produced two other books with Will Holder: Agape and Between Thought and Sound. Waterman was an artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial where he built a television studio, and installation space inside the museum in order to produce 3 operas by Robert Ashley. He has taught at Bard College (MFA program), NYU, Bloomfield College, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. His writings appear in Dot Dot Dot, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, A Circular, and The Third Rail.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Stadsdeel Zuid, and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

15 October – 17 December 2016
Preview 14 October, 5–7 pm

This exhibition takes place at a special location:
Hazenstraat 28, 1016 SR Amsterdam

is an exhibition of twenty years of Will Holder’s work with publications, talks, printed matter, and teaching presented through individual selections by nine different guests: Sara de Bondt, Linda van Deursen, Johanna Ehde, Elisabeth Klement, Maxine Kopsa, Kaisa Lassinaro, Mason Leaver-Yap, Riet Wijnen and Felicia von Zweigbergk. The main purpose of the exhibition is to make a book. Using Kunstverein as space for writing, printing and binding – Will Holder will recall hundreds of tiny material decisions made in response to a specific context of past collaborators’ work. The book will be self-published and printed on demand, and is called

Visitors are welcome to look through the archive, view the weekly presentations and order a copy of STAPLES (EUR 15, excl. postage). STAPLES will be printed and hand bound on demand on the premises. Each copy potentially different in content.

STAPLES will be the first catalog of Will Holder’s work and will also be the first book published by a (“uh”) books, Glasgow – an initiative of Will Holder with Emmie Mcluskey.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Stadsdeel Zuid, and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

Dear BYU friend and attendee,
Join us this Thursday July 7 for BYU #49: The Sell Out.

Before we toss off our clothes for the summer, we welcome you at the last, possibly ever, BOB’s YOUR UNCLE of the season. We are packing up and will be discarding many things: paint, glass & glasses, wood & carpet, But mostly BOOKS. Bargains can be found, or made, on lots of our stock! So don’t miss out and come say hi (and bye) before exiting the city.

Serving: left-overs
doors: 12 till 5pm

Yours truly,

B.Y.U.
Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132
1073 VX, Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 3313203
office@kunstverein.nl
www.kunstverein.nl

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday June 23 for BYU #48:
Better Decision, a conference with Robertas Narkus (LT)

Let’s envision, together, the scope of a new, possibly humorous, system for production and collaboration. Imagine, with us, the future. In the semi-casual setting of BOB’s YOUR UNCLE, Robertas Narkus, founder of Visionierius, will give an introduction to its program Visionierius is a Lithuanian-based cooperation which aims to intersect the cutting edge ideas from the world of the arts with those of science, and combine those with the professionalism of local craftsmanship. This vital alliance is based on a sharing of acts and thoughts and forms in itself an urgent exercise in freedom.

19.30 doors open
19.40 Welcome word by Visionierius CEO, Robertas Narkus
19.50 Introduction to the Concept of Visionierius
20.10 Snacks and Refreshments
21.00 doors close

Time and space are limited, so please confirm your presence.

RSVP before June 22nd to bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl and mention your name and the number of people that will be joining.

Sincerely,
Bob

CEO
B.Y.U.
Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132
1073 VX, Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 3313203
office@kunstverein.nl
www.kunstverein.nl

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Coming To Your Senses by Zazie Stevens
15–19 June 2016
Opening: Friday, 17 June 6–9 p.m.

Placing emphasis on the ‘nothing to say’, the point of pointlessness.
The message of the flower is the flower.

The thought image is not the same as the visual image that appears when one looks at an actual thing. The mental image is vague; the image that appears to the physical eye is specific. Mental images appear as conceptual images of a perceived thing, encompassing the abstract trace of all images one has seen.

In the first moment of perception there is direct sensory experience. In the second moment, a concept arises, superimposed on direct perception. Vivid perception is obscured by that concept: instead of seeing, hearing, or tasting the clear, specific thing, one experiences its conceptual replicas through a filter of general understanding. The thing itself becomes vague, immediately loosing contact with its initial, singular affect.

Photographs can capture the space of love, they point to that love, poignantly suspending what text says. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes looked for a photograph of his late mother and found it. But looking at the photograph he didn’t get over his loss. He had ‘nothing to say’, like Zen according to Alan Watts and corresponding to Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. “The horror is this: I have no other recourse than this irony, to speak of the ‘nothing to say’”. Barthes’ last piece of writing, for a talk he never gave, was found on his desk at his death and was entitled: ‘One always fails in speaking of what one loves.’

Zazie Stevens (1988, NL) explored the relationship between artistic creativity, perception and meditative experience. By highlighting both clarity and obscurations through poetry, theoretical research and a series of exercises she investigated Buddhist art principles reflecting on her practice of documenting, relating to perception.

Coming To Your Senses is part of A Festival of Choices, Master of Fine Arts Graduation 2016, Sandberg Instituut, 15–19 June 2016, various locations throughout Amsterdam. A Festival of Choices emphasizes upon the relationship and choices made between the graduating student and the diverse range of institutions and organizations offered within the cultural landscape of Amsterdam. For more information and the full program, please check www.festivalofchoices.nl

This Wednesday June 8 at BYU:

My friend Jonas is a pretty good dresser, I would describe his style as “JFK on a Sunday”. When, one day, he was telling me about his plan to buy a hat, I pointed at the first person wearing a Fedora and asked if maybe he wanted to look like that jerk. He told me “that guy isn’t wearing a hat, the hat is wearing him”. During B.Y.U. this Wednesday, June 8, I’m proposing we all wear hats (proudly), on the sidewalk in front of Kunstverein or inside the bar.

The night will also include a talk by Lieven Lahaye; about hats, caps and provisional thoughts on how, if we would just concede and go along with things, taking minimal steps towards social conformity, great social change might be brought forth.

Doors open at 7.30 p.m.
Serving: Manhattan

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

BYU #46 – Watermarks Broadcast
with DES (LT) and Kevin Rice (USA)

Join us this FRIDAY May 27th for a live broadcast of Watermarks at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE. Watermarks is a musical exploratory initiative set in motion by DES (LT) & Kevin Rice (USA). In their collaboration they focus on rare and beautiful sounds from below the surface; a sonic journey of presents a nighttime advance, of beautiful sounds from both past and present.

Doors open at 8 p.m.
Serving: A watered down cocktail

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

with Lotte Lara Schröder

Hello Inertia,

you are here as your physical self.
Not as the representation or your proclaimed truth.
Thank you for coming.

What I would like to share is personal. It’s a random, yet controlled sequence of images, thoughts, sounds. A representation of experiences. Experiences derived from a childhood fascination for the volcano, its literal and metaphorical presence, its untouchable energy.

Let it be violent and beautiful, nestle inside your body, through its frequencies and alcoholic fluids, mold you into a flow of volcanic energy.

For this night at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE, Lotte Lara Schröder will present a series of interdisciplinary works set in motion by and expiring mental report. The works are a metaphor for the slow, energetic build-up – similar to both volcanic as well as personal outbursts. Join us for a hot, energetic and undoubtedly, eventful night.

Doors open at 7.30 p.m.
Serving: Volkan Beer, Black and Blond*

*Volkan beer brings together, Lava Rock filtered mineral water and the best of local ingredients from the volcanic island of Santorini. Since the Mediterranean Island receives little rainfall, what grows on it is intense in flavor and limited in quantity. Volkan beer is a Greek Debt Free™ product. With every 1 euro of profit, they help reduce the Greek National debt by 50 euro cents. Help Greece.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday May 12 for the presentation of Fig. 3 with Nerijus Rimkus (LT)

Doors at 7.30 p.m.
Serving Ouroborus Liliaceae / Cruciferae

The third event in a series presenting one of the missing flowers of the final flower arrangement of blooming vegetables. Each event is an allegory presenting the ongoing research on the fine line between aesthetic assumptions and functional use.

*Fig. 1: June 3 2015, Blooming Radish. Fig. 2: October 10 2016, Final Flower Arrangement.

For the occasion Kunstverein is presenting the second postcard in its series. It will be for sale at Kunstverein or can be ordered via office@kunstverein.nl

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Welcome to the very first gathering of the Jack Lemmon Support Group at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE on Thursday May 5th.

Doors open at 7.30 p.m.
Serving: Little Mothers, the classic amongst classics.

Dear supporters,

Jack Lemmon was an actor not a sculptor. You all know that that’s not true. His sculptures are widely seen, but just not acknowledged as such.

We would like to invite you to re-make together a sculpture Jack Lemmon made for the film The Apartment by Billy Wilder in which he plays a character named C.C. Baxter that is forced out of his apartment by his superiors, because they want to use it for their adulterous acts. In his eagerness to climb the ladder he capitulates time and again, but despises himself for it. Disgusted and bored he carves out time with Dry Martini’s in a bar around the corner.

Please join us to re-circle the circle that Jack made and spiral downwards into the alcoholic void while imagining the space of your own apartments, and what they look like and how they are, without you in them.

Sincerely,
Bob and gerlach en koop

Please note that space is limited.
JLSG-members & KV-members have priority.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Jessica Warboys, Angle Pose
17 April – 10 June 2016

Opening: 17 April 3–6 pm
With a special performance by Morten Norbye Halvorsen at 5pm.

For Kunstverein, Jessica Warboys creates an all-emersive mise-en-scene, marrying large scale (sea) paintings, bent metal lamps, sculptural objects and film. The viewer experiences the exhibition from the spine of an enforced catwalk running down the middle of the space.

An Attempt to Evolve (ongoing)
A talk by Will Holder
–
Wednesday 13 April, 8pm

–
In advance of the forthcoming Materialist Inventory, a book and an exhibition at Kunstverein this fall, Will Holder will give a talk about typography/ organisation of language/ automatic writing/ survival of ideas/ bodies as documents/ “sometime all of them will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them,”
–
Typographer Will Holder produces oral and printed publications with artists and musicians, and is preoccupied with conversation as model and tool for a mutual and improvised set of publishing conditions – whereby the usual roles of commissioner, author, subject, editor, printer and typographer are improvised and shared, as opposed to assigned and pre-determined. Particular attention is placed on an oral production of value and meaning around cultural objects, and how live, extra-informational qualities might be analyzed, documented and scored.
 Based in Glasgow, Holder is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts (published by de Appel, Amsterdam, since 2007). He co-curated TalkShow (with Richard Birkett) at the ICA, London, an exhibition and season of events concerning speech and accountability. Together with Alex Waterman, he edited and typeset Yes, But Is It Edible?, The music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices (Vancouver: New Documents, 2014). Holder is a 2015 recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.

Member’s only exclusive tour of Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art by Marja Bloem, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (RSVP to office@kunstverein.nl)

Marja Bloem, director of the Egress Foundation, Seth Siegelaub’s partner and a current board member of Kunstverein, will guide us through his impressive collection. The tour is guaranteed to give an inside perspective on the material on display and will allow us far more insight into Seth’s thoughts on contemporary art and the institutions around it. His pioneering approach, still today exceedingly urgent, should afford plenty of substance for conversation afterwards, when we conclude the tour with a drink at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE.

If you haven’t reserved a ticket yet, or would like to become a member in order to join this special members only event, don’t hesitate to contact us at office@kunstverein.nl.

The tour starts at 6 pm in the foyer of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Jokes With Seth Siegelaub
Friday 1 April 2016

An evening of presentations, screenings, talks and jokes at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Invited by Kunstverein, artist David Bernstein reads from a selection of jokes from Kunstverein Publishing’s forthcoming publication: The Joke Book. Collected by Seth Siegelaub (June 2016).

Program begins at 7 pm in the Teijin Auditorium of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

The annual Spring Performance Festival (SPF) is hosted by Kunstverein and Galerie Juliette Jongma, this year in collaboration with De Ateliers, Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Vleeshal.
SPF 2016 will take place on Sunday 20 March and will include a.o. performances by Vaginal Davis, Simone Forti, Nora Turato, Raed Yassin, Mehraneh Atashi and Rodrigo Sobarzo de Larraechea.

For more information on the program and locations, see http://www.kunstverein.nl/SPF2016/

Join us Sunday 6 March for BYU #41: Ian F. Svenonius performs ESCAPE-ISM

Doors open at 5.30 p.m.
Serving: The Last Word
And with an introduction by Experimental Jetset

ESCAPE-ISM is a found-sound dream-drama performed by singer, author, filmmaker and talk show host, Ian F. Svenonius (known from Chain & the Gang, The Make-Up, Weird War, Soft Focus, etc.) on the occasion of the release of his new book of essays and stories, Censorship, now!!

ESCAPE-ISM is a live collage, a ritual offering to the fractured landscape of AM radio. A broadcast of doppler radar weather reports, drums, electric guitars, electro-magnetic tapes, eye-in-the-sky traffic reports, game-time sportcasts, guest appearances, live interviews, machines, sermons, sickening sounds, stolen samples world news and many opinions.

“Censorship Now!! is reorganizing people’s ideas about censorship, Ikea, documentary filmmaking, the Berlin Wall, the film Heathers, the twist, the frug, the mashed potato, shaving one’s body, Apple, Inc., Nordic functionalism, the supposed benevolence of Wikipedia, hoarding, college rock, the origins of the Internet, and more.” – Akashic Books

Please note that space is limited.
KV Members have priority.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday 18 February for the second adaptation of ‘Bibliomania: Haven O’More’ a play written and performed by Olivier Lebrun and Alex Balgiu.

“What can you do, when you are forty and – having avoided alarm systems, fooled the distracted librarian, squirmed through ventilation ducts, left the place with your precious catch and finally put it up on one of your extraordinary shelves – you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss.”

Doors open at 7.30 p.m.
Serving To Have No More

Olivier Lebrun is a French graphic designer based in Paris. He is the author of “Stolen Works of Art” (self published, 2010) and “A Pocket Companion to Books from the Simpsons in Alphabetical Order” (Rollo Press, 2012, 2013). He is currently working with Urs Lehni and Camille Pageard on the forthcoming monography of Bernard Chadebec (Rollo Press, 2016).

Alex Balgiu is a Romanian French designer and theorist. He specialised in the phenomena of animality and kinship in social relationships through (American) Literature. Together with Thierry Chancogne he also runs the publishing house and research platform Tombolo Presses.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

CANCELLED!

Dear member, guest & friend,

Unfortunately tonight’s BYU with Floris Vanhoof has been cancelled, due to illness. We are very sorry about this, as we were hoping to treat you all to a spectacular night with music, tequila and film by this young, experimental film-maker.
You are still welcome to visit us during the day (between 1–5 pm) to see our new show Hans de Vries ‘Works 1968–1975’ and we look forward to raising our glasses again on February 18 in the company of Olivier Lebrun & Alex Balgiu.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday or Friday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday 28 January for BYU #38: Gerard Herman

Experimental, solo-concert with instruments from Gerard Hermans personal collection of household objects — selected on account of how they sound, not how they look.

Doors open: 7.30 p.m.
Serving: Speak Low

Gerard Herman (BE, 1989) is an artist based in Antwerp. His work focusses on language and the absurdities of every day life – his observations are put into works of various form and media. Herman is also one-half of the publishing house Groepdruk as well as tutor at the graphics departement in KASK, Ghent.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Hans de Vries ‘Works 1968–1975’
23 January – 19 March 2016

Opening 23 January 6–8 pm

With a new publication published by Kunstverein Publishing
Partner: Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen

Hans de Vries concentrated on the study and registration of processes and appearances that occur in and are created by nature. De Vries was a close observer, an onlooker, an eyewitness, whose aim was to discern and document the relationship between man and his natural environment. His practice has been referred to as “micro-emotive art”, a term coined by the Italian artist Piero Gilardi. Micro-emotive art was art that arose from the interest in minimal sensations and experiences (micro-emotions) –the results of slow processes otherwise not readily perceived.

De Vries’s practice was fully integrated in his daily life. He lived in the countryside and registered every detail of his domestic existence. Developments in nature were studied and phenomena one might consider superfluous, were highlighted. This accumulation of facts and observations has been captured in his publications – the artist books of Hans de Vries.

His first book, Het Tuinboek, [The Garden Book] was published in 1971 as part of the Atlas voor een nieuwe metropool [The Atlas For a New Metropole], edited by Jan Donia and published by the Rotterdam Fund For the Arts. Een jaar rond: huiselijke activiteiten en het weer [A Full Year: Domestic Activity and the Weather], Hilversum, Becht, 1971, was published with the help of collectors Agnes en Frits Becht. An example of a self-published book is Kruisingen [Intersections] published in 1973 in Finsterwolde. These publications were only distributed in galleries (like Seriaal) in Amsterdam.

The illustrated De geschiedenis van de citroengeranium [The History of a Citrus Geranium] was published in 1973 by Art Animation in Groningen. This book was the result of a close study of a Citrus Geranium De Vries and his wife, Emmy, initiated in September of 1970. The artist book Stijgbeelden van vruchten [Growth Images of Fruits] is a folder with an original photograph published alongside the exhibition of the same title in the print gallery of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in 1975.

Het Dooie beestenboek [The Dead Animal Book] published by De Harmonie Amsterdam a year before Stijgbeelden van vruchten, is the first book that was available in Dutch bookstores. It is a registry of all the dead animals he and his wife came across in 1971 on their way to Winschoten from their home town, Beerta in the north of the Netherlands. This publication’s design reflects De Vries’s manner of working: showing things as they are, plainly, and with little to no formal concern. Het Dooie beestenboek straightforwardly displays each dead animal accompanied by a handwritten text and a sketch of the situation in which it was found.

Hans de Vries ‘Works 1968–1975’ is De Vries’s first exhibition since he stopped producing art at end of the 1970s. It is a retrospective of all the publications and book-related works including parallel articles and essays about his practice.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Mondriaan Fonds, Stadsdeel Zuid, and the Agnes & Frits Becht Collection.

Jennifer Tee meets COBRA*
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Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Frits Lemaire & Eugène Brands, Jennifer Tee, Raoul Ubac, Reinhoud
In collaboration with The Cobra Museum of Modern Art
November 29, 2015–January 16, 2016

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Book launch of Jennifer Tee’s The Soul in Limbo: ‘Listening to The Soul in Limbo’ November 29, 12–2pm, with live music by Glenn Ryszko, octopus rice triangles & bloody caesars

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Copyright: Frits Lemaire/MAI

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It’s always better to be a little bit hungry
-Agnes Martin

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[Two women sit down at a rectangular table across from one another. Both open their laptops and type in google docs. One makes a ‘zip your mouth’ motion with her right hand. The other nods. The first starts to type. The other follows.]

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Short forms

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If I were a branch

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Awkward poses

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If I were a…The one thing people probably still read is a list.

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How long will it all last?

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I mean, how do we have to go on?

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Yoga

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Sculpture

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[She looks up over the head of her companion, out of the window]

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When the water reflects up onto the trees and you stare at it for a while you make the trees move.

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If yoga could turn into sculpture.

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Breathe, breathe. Breathe towards the belly.

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How do you do that? I always end up just sticking out my belly and hoping the air will find its way down and up.

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A carpet that determines the spacing of movement. No foot stepped out of the rectangle. I remember a grey man doing a grey performance on a grey carpet.

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And the urns, oh the urns.

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The urns that are death but also vessels to hold food, grains and air.

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Next to them, they sit, cross-legged, knees not quite touching the floor. And their hands are open upwards. Their arms stretched high, but their elbows still bent. Welcoming, but awkward.

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[She looks out of the window again]

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Laissez-faire gardening.

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Seasonal curating?

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No. Well, yes. Maybe that would be more interesting.

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Peter Brook talks about the stage the empty stage and if you cross it you assume an audience, or you affect one. I can take an empty space he says and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.[1]

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Tee’s work affects. Now there’s a start.

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Tick tock
Tick Tock

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OK. OK.

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*Kunstverein is the proud host of the launch of artist Jennifer Tee’s Monograph ‘The Soul in Limbo’, published in conjunction with her winning the prestigious Cobra Art Prize Amstelveen, and her solo exhibition of the same title, held at The Cobra Museum of Modern Art (24 November 2015 – 21 February 2016). As a means of creating a mise-en-scene for the publication, Kunstverein, together with Jennifer Tee and the Museum have selected historic and lesser-known works from the museum’s collection creating an intimate and perhaps impertinent exhibition. The associations and non-hierarchal, cross-historical pollination between selected works from the Cobra and Tee allow Tee’s work to enter into a conceptual and formal discussion with specific pieces and specific concerns. The selection was based on a definitive parallel that can be drawn between the works of Reinhoud, Brands and Alechinsky and Tee’s, most notably in Tee’s and their study and use of ethnographic sources. As well as the role of the shaman, the magician – which overlaps in all works. A spiritual and expressionist interest in the earlier pieces might even be brought into a conversation with such contemporary thought as Objet Oriented Ontology (OOO), a ‘movement’ that Tee’s work is conceptually connected with.

The event entitled ‘Listening to the Soul in Limbo’ is a performative launch that takes place during Amsterdam Art Weekend, presenting the book through live music and ritual. ‘Listening to The Soul in Limbo’ also marks the opening of the exhibition ‘Jennifer Tee meets Cobra’ at Kunstverein.

[1] Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1968 (Penguin edition, 2008)

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Mondriaan Fonds, and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Join us this Thursday for BYU#37 with Glenn Ryszko

14012016.vid – a quadraphonic sound piece on intimacy.

Doors open: 7.30 p.m.
Evening starts at 8 p.m. with a short screening followed by the performance

Serving: specialized beers marked for the occasion by Lotte Schröder.
Live stream: 20 hrs

What does intimacy mean for a community that shares personal information via the internet like it was sharing a sandwich? How does this exchange function in its online surrounding and how does it reflect upon exchange offline? These questions form the starting point for the sound piece made for this intimate gathering. By ripping, analyzing and combining audio fragments from YouTube videos in which people share their very private thoughts with – potentially – millions of viewers, Glenn Ryszko focuses on a specific sort of interchange. 14012016.vid is a documentary on human behavior that varies in intensity from the extremely personal to the extremely random.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Please join us this Friday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for ‘Curse of The Walking Techbane’

Doors open at 19.30
Talk begins at 20.00
Serving the Gremlin

Mathew Kneebone will talk about how experiencing a sequence of technical problems can lead to forms of superstitious behaviour. Supposedly able to short circuit electrical systems, magnetise objects, and block wireless signals, a Walking Techbane is someone who believes that their ongoing issues with technology are beyond coincidence.

Together with the talk will be a display of works by the artist.

Mathew Kneebone is an artist and former researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Amongst his interests are the methods that end-user’s adopt to cope with technological issues. His work addresses our relationship to technology through historically tracing examples of innovation, planned obsolescence, black boxing, and user-level anxieties.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Please join us this Friday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for Date Night #3: GAME ♠ WAR ♥ LOVE featuring Jay Tan in a busker-inspired bodily communication.

Doors open at 19.30, performance will happen unannounced.
Serving: Endless Love (ft. Mariah Carey)

Jay Tan is currently, next to her usual practice, exercising repressed dreams of being a magical, french, butoh, acrobat (not unlike her fantasised version of Denis Lavant) and trying to tell people how she feels by talking less.

Date Night is inspired by the triangle of forces GAME ♠ WAR ♥ LOVE, mainly inspired by the special ménage between Michelle Bernstein and Guy Debord, but recurrent more or less unconsciously in all kinds of relationships and love affairs. With the aim of unveiling artists’ personal lives, side practices, dreams, habits or hobbies as connectivity catalysts, Date Night presents them in a space ruled by a common awareness of the attendees, which is that they might have the possibility to fall in love anytime, even during the same evening.

Emma Panza is the instigator of Date Night.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Please join us this Thursday for “Quitting the Band” by Nickel van Duijvenboden – a reading and drum solo.

Doors open at 7.30 p.m.
Reading and drumming start at 8 p.m.

Serving the Bitter Apple

Nickel van Duijvenboden is a writer and artist from Amsterdam. He is currently about to leave the Rijksakademie, where he has been dedicating himself to paper and electronic correspondences and their spin-offs as an artistic mode. He has lately taken up drumming again, as a rhythmic consequence of writing and reading.

In his late teens and early twenties he used to be the drummer of a metalcore band with ties to the vegan-straight edge scene. This youthful experience in a way preceded a commitment to art and writing, and foreshadowed the precariousness of being in a community. It was marked by a gap between the joy of playing music together and the ideological rigour of the ‘scene’, which in fact amounted to a substitute form of conformism – a conformism within antagonism.

At BOB’S YOUR UNCLE Nickel will try to get out of his usual writerly and readerly role and improvise on the drums as an homage to whomever has had to quit the band.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Hreinn Friðfinnsson
‘I collected personal secrets’, (1972–2015)
12 September – 7 November 2015
Opening: 12 September, 6–8 pm

In the early 1970s, the Icelandic artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson (b. 1943, Iceland) placed an advert in a Dutch art magazine asking people to send him their secrets. By posing as a collector of secrets, the artist would, he thought, allay suspicions that he had any ulterior motive in using or revealing privileged information that might come his way. It is like something from a novel by José Saramago, or an urban myth or rumour. The secret, Friðfinnsson may be telling us, is that there isn’t one. His art, on the other hand, is an invitation to imagine that there might be.

The artist’s work is celebrated for its lyricism and stark poetry that transcends the often-commonplace subjects and materials that the artist uses to create his pieces. Although there is a consistency of theme and a common emotional thread to his art, the media that Friðfinnsson employs are remarkably varied in scale and substance, from photography, drawings and tracings to presentations and installations of sound, texts and ready-mades. Friðfinnnsson often presents found objects with which he interferes as little as possible, creating new works that investigate ideas of the self and of time. He has said that: “Notions of time are always compelling. I read what comes my way about physics and mathematics, but I read as one who is uninitiated. The feeling and the interest in the essence of time is serious, but my dealing with time is not knowledge-based; it is more exploratory and feeling-based”.

Iceland seems a long way from the sophisticated cosmopolitanism. Friðfinnsson, who has lived in the Netherlands for more than 40 years, wants us to appreciate both the culture he comes from, and the larger world in which he finds himself. There is an important lesson in this, especially from someone who has hidden himself somewhere deep down in Amsterdam with rarely a public appearance. His relationship to the world finds itself at the ‘self’. Friðfinnsson is a natural storyteller; hence that most of his works often beg a narrative, or the fabrication of a story, even when there isn’t one.

After 40 years, Friðfinnsson will conclude his “secrets project” for the exhibition at Kunstverein. The accumulated secrets will be used as base for a monochrome painting, which will be on display alongside the advertisements the project had published throughout the years.

Organized by Krist Gruijthuijsen

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold)members, Mondriaan Fonds, and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Dear Maxine,

How is your summer? It’s been a while we haven’t spoke about the upcoming show, so I decided to write you my recent thoughts which are now gathering in a shape of a SHIP.

Let’s start by saying that while understanding darkness as a mutual agreement, I decided to divide my 24 hrs exhibition into two time periods – day and night and start the whole with an invitation to the darkness of the “Mid Manhattan Library”. The performance can be seen as the trial of the hypothesis of the philosopher Empedocles, which states that light is a product of the human eye. In the fifth century BC, he postulated that everything – all matter – was composed of the four elements: fire, air, earth and water. He also believed that Aphrodite made the human eye out of them and lit the fire, which shone out from the eye making sight possible.

Empedocles knew that things were somewhat more complicated than this, and guessed there was an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a source such as the sun. The audience of the performance is invited to the live try-out of the hypothesis, during which they listen to the narrator retelling the floor plan of the PC Lab in the Mid Manhattan Library.

I think of this work as a way to participate in a usual state of mind – to be in two places at the same time. I also see it as a real time extension of one of the infrastructures, underlining how libraries are places of shared knowledge and manufacturing.

Did you know that public libraries in the US are investing in 3-D printing machines now, so people can use them easily and less expensively? I read about a team of doctors, who wanted to assist the doctors performing the operation, but ordering a replica of the boy’s skull would have taken two to three weeks and cost about $4,000, so they went to the Chicago Public Library instead, and printed out a replica of the boy’s skull using a 3-D printer. The model of the skull took just 12 hours to make, cost $20 and the surgery was successful.

This reminds me of a cartoon I saw recently, which shows a furious foolish rhetorically asking why we still need libraries, when standing in front of a newly renovated branch of a public library. The picture itself suggests at least several, socially charged answers, one being the Unemployed Man using the Internet connection in order to find a job. This is just one example that brings us back to the bounce between creativity and function, the authority and the extension of infrastructure, which starts from one’s dream, defined by one’s reliances. How do the current social needs disguise themselves and what different shapes and forms are they ready to take?

The dream of the aforementioned Unemployed Man supplements the architecture and the concept of every branch of every public library and becomes a ship travelling from one to another, with variable measurements and weights.

The performance in Kunstverein would be guided by the friend of mine, Antanas Laukaitis, a famous hip hop Dj in Lithuania who goes under the name “Now U Don’t”, and mainly plays 1993-1998 east coast rap and other same school hip-hop music. At the moment I am dealing now with cafe de Duivel and hope that Antanas can dj there in the night-time of the show, thus becoming the main composer of the SHIP.

When it starts to get darker and the performance series finishes, Kunstverein will become an enlightened gallery space, and the visitors will be invited to take a walk out in the city. I am thinking specifically of one spot in Amsterdam, which can only be experienced by knowing of the specific gaps in the infrastructure of town. As for now, I imagine continuing my show with a meeting near the secret entrance to Artis, The Royal Zoo, used by my friends and I to enter and have walks around the zoo on Sunday evenings.

As such, instead of perceiving the shift of day to night as a discipline, I take it as an example and as a metaphor of the shift between private to public, legality and to illegality. As we both know, invisible things are not just overshadowed by the darkness of the night. Therefore, I think of the gaps in the infrastructure, as independent aestheticized forms.

Meanwhile, Kunstverein will become a bleached-out space containing a few objects: including remains and props of the Mid Manhattan Library performance, such as open cinema tickets as well us amorphous plasticine sculptures by artist (my father) Gediminas Akstinas. He made them in 1988, at the same age as me now and so I thought it would be important for him to participate in this show, as another artist, who shares the same body.

The constant presence of collaboration in this show, lead me to think about the flyer and the map of the exhibition, which could have a design provided by one of the widely accessible places in town. For now I am thinking of collaborating with Sonny Falafels, which is just around the corner from Kunstverein and one my favourite fast food stops. I think it would be nice if the flyers of the show could be spread around before the show and interfuse with other flyers, which connect to the mix of entertainment and hardcore labor . During the night, this flyer could also become one of the objects in the show, bleached in the gallery light of Kunstverein.

I have to think of the friction between desire and consent, leisure and labor, imagination and authority. That’s why “SHIP” became my working title, as an open invitation, depending on the speed of economy and the sharing of knowledge. Imagination is our compass, although we don’t own it.

As for now I would love to come to Kunstverein and measure the space. Maybe it would be a good chance to meet? And what is the deadline for the press release? I also wanted to ask you about the printed matter, is it possible for Kunstverein to print the flyers for the show?

Let me know your thoughts.

Very best,
Gediminas

SHIP is an exhibition by Gediminas Akstinas with works by Gediminas Akstinas and Gediminas Akstinas. It takes place from 5 September until 6 September, from 9 am until 9 am, at Kunstverein and, from midnight, at Cafe De Duivel.

Stand up, script, reverse
Friday June 26, 4-8pm
At Apollohal Gymnasium, Amsterdam, NL
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Please join us for Stand up, script, reverse, an event that introduces the artists Alexis Blake and Ilke Gers‘ research process into the transference of knowledge through the body. The event is both a site of research and production. Participants are invited to join the artists and experts in investigating the conditioned and intuitive body by exploring the idea of play and freedom within rules and structured systems.

Participants will learn a new set of skills with self-defense instructor Cesario Di Domenico tap into their body and mind connection with sport psychologist Anna Loots and draw another awareness of the body in space with Blake and Gers.

Stand up, script, reverse is presented within the contextual framework of Disassemblies, which is part of Knowledge is a Does – a reading group formed during a residency period at the Jan van Eyck Academie.

As places are limited, 30 participants, please send an email to reserve to office@kunstverein.nl (members have priority).
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Apollohal Gymnasium
Apollolaan 4
1077 BA Amsterdam

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This project was made possible by the generous support of Jan van Eyck Academie. Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Cesario Di Domenico – Martial Arts Academy Amsterdam, Anna Loots – Vereniging voor Sportpsychologie Nederland, and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Join us this Friday, 19.30 – 22.00, at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for

A reading playlist.

The book launch of the exhibitions Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell and Your Time Is Not My Time of the Curatorial Programme of de Appel arts centre. Designed by Dongyoung Lee.

A performance by Laurent-David Garnier, #INEFFABLE at 20.00

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff. A project by Valentina Desideri

23 May – 25 June 2015
Opening: Saturday 23 May, 6–8 pm

Jessica Warboys, Four Lines, 2011

Look at your hand, that tool between a fin and a wing, which developed fingers, a thumb and now grasps and touches everything, real and imaginary. It images the real in its tactile rendering of objects, distances and shapes. It realizes the imaginary by gesturing, approximating thinking through space.

Can I read your hand?

Its surface, gestures and lines offer a complex image that calls for reading. Many readings actually, as each reading is in turn an imaging, a composition, an expression of possibilities.

Jason and Raimundas, Céline, Audrey, Koenraad, Jessica – Can I read your work?

Dr. Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986) read the palms of André Breton, Man Ray, Maurice Ravel, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Antonin Artaud, Cecil Beaton and Aldous Huxley. She read their character in their hands and their palms also figure in her now rare and exceptional book Studies in Hand-Reading (1936).

But reading always happens between at least two: the reader and what is read – be it books, palms, objects, people, artworks. To engage in this kind of reading together is to engage in study. I propose to gather in the Studio, with books, hands, artworks, coffee and drinks, to read.

On Saturday 23 May
Christian Hawkey will read his poems
On Wednesday 27 May and Thursday 11 June
Annick Kleizen and Valentina Desideri will unravel ways of reading
On Saturday 30 May
Luisa Ungar and Milena Bonilla will read Céline Condorelli’s coffee
On Friday 5 June
Ben Woodard will talk about the relation between gestures and thinking
On Tuesday 16 June
Tim Ingold will discuss lines and making
On Friday 19 June
Stefano Harney will lead us in study
On Thursday 25 June
Denise Ferreira da Silva will talk about notions of reading and imaging

A Studio in Hand-Reading is an exhibition, a studio, a study and a display of artworks and their author’s hands.

Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986): scientist, radical sexologist, chirologist, philosopher, wearer of men’s clothes, psychologist of gesture, lesbian identified* acts as an attractor for topics and ways to read in the Studio.

Valentina Desideri proposes the Studio as a place that generates modes of being together. She will be present in the exhibition throughout the exhibition, inviting participants as well as visitors to gather for reading and in study. This Studio will be the basis for a publication (to be launched at the end of 2015 by Kunstverein Publishing). The exhibition begins with one work by Jason Dodge and Raimundas Malašauskas and a reading by American poet, translator, editor, activist, and educator Christian Hawkey. The show continues to accumulate artworks weekly: following Jason Dodge and Raimundas Malašauskas, Céline Condorelli, Audrey Cottin, Koenraad Dedobbeleer and Jessica Warboys will lend a work and a print of their palms, available for reading in the Studio. The Studio – and its bar – will be open for reading during Kunstverein’s regular opening hours, punctuated by weekly contributions to the study by the invited guests and artists.

*From Christian Hawkey’s N Ear Flowers Re Fre/nd: A Poets’ Play

A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff. A project by Valentina Desideri

With: Liudvikas Buklys, Céline Condorelli, Audrey Cottin, Mike Cooter, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Jason Dodge and Raimundas Malašauskas, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Stefano Harney, Christian Hawkey, Tim Ingold, Annick Kleizen, Luisa Ungar and Milena Bonilla, Jessica Warboys and Ben Woodard

Valentina Desideri is an Amsterdam-based artist. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006) and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she co-organises Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Prof. Stefano Harney, she writes biographies by reading people’s hands, she engages in Poetical Readings with Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva.

Please follow the updates regarding scheduling for A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff on this website and on facebook. Weekly invitations will also be sent out to announce forthcoming events.

Much thanks to Stadsdeel Zuid, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Sandberg Instituut, Mondriaan Fonds as well as Kunstverein’s (Gold) members for their generous support.

Please join us this Saturday 9 May for the Book Binding Consultancy

From 11 am to 8 pm

Maria Jimena Sanchez and Jungmyung Lee – book binding professionals – will be consulting and offering the best binding solutions for your specific/special printed projects.

There are two packages of consulting available:

1. Consultation
15 euros / 30 minutes

2. Consultation + Binding
10 euros (for a consultation) + tailored price depending on the number of pages, copies and binding solution

For either package you will need to book in advance. Please send your time preference and a brief description of your project to:

jungmyung@werkplaatstypografie.org
jimena@werkplaatstypografie.org

We will get back to you with a confirmation of your appointment before Saturday.

Please join us this Thursday 30 April, 7–10 p.m. for Mime Radio, the launch.

Expect music and stories.
Serving: Amateur Delight

Mime Radio was performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited into a novel. The story revolves around a cast of eccentric characters, who meet at the Tiki Coco, a bar in Los Angeles that holds “Challenging Reality Open Mic” nights for amateur inventors and performers. Eventually, the protagonists get caught up in trying to help Marsyas, a character from ancient Greek mythology that lost his body after being defeated in a music contest against the god Apollo, to recover his voice, his very ancient voice. Unbeknownst to them, this recovery unleashes a disaster… Mime Radio is a novel about how language and perception can be one and the same.

Mime Radio by Benjamin Seror is Edited by <o> future <o> and published by: Bat; Adéra; CRAC Alsace; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; and Sternberg Press.

ISBN 978-3-95679-151-2
€ 20

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for summery drinks, readings and sun dance beats from Greece.

In the name of Half Man Half Orange

If magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all, it might be indeed possible to mistake one for the other. No wonder language found its origin in myths. This summer reader is about the cup of coffee that keeps us awake every morning. How much of it has to do with caffeine and how much of it with our will to believe in rituals? Amen.

This publication brings together all the spiritual advice, scientific gossip, self-esteem exercises and chronic fictions that were read, written, watched, played, forgotten and discussed over a year in Arnhem by the Werkplaats Typografie participants.

Half Man Half Orange
12 x 17cm; 288pp

With contributions by Amir Avraham, Fred Cave, Yana Foqué, Daniel Frota, Virginie Gauthier, Daria Kiseleva, Mathew Kneebone, Fay Kolokytha, Menelaos Kouroudis, Jungmyung Lee, Iván Martinez, Laura Pappa, Christine Pogatchnik and Maria Jimena Sánchez

Edited by Daniel Frota and Menelaos Kouroudis and with support from Maxine Kopsa
Designed by Daniel Frota

Published by Werkplaats Typografie/ ArtEZ Institute of the Arts
www.werkplaatstypografie.org
Arnhem, 2015





PLUS:

Witness the sneak preview of

Mime radio (notes for chapter I to XII)

Mime Radio was performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited into a novel.

For the first time, Mime radio (notes for chapter I to XII) presents all the models employed as part of the Mime Radio performances. This series of notes draws a mental landscape of the story told in Mime Radio.

On view until Saturday 2 May with the Mime Radio book launch happening next week, on Thursday 30 April

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for The Hummingbird’s Perch by Scott Rogers

Come to rest fast beating wings.

Wear crimson, celebrate the thaw.

A bright spot in a spring shower.

Sweet citrus. Potent nectar. Hibiscus business.

The April migration takes its toll.

Stay a while.

Doors open at 19.30
Serving Nectar
Dress Code: Red accents
Video: Rufous Hummingbird at rest
Sound: Wingbeats chopped and screwed
Flowers: Tropical or seasonal

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Thursday 23 April, 7:00 pm
Mime Radio (notes for chapter I to XII)
Until 2 May

Thursday 30 April, 7:00–10:00 pm
Mime Radio, the launch

Mime Radio was performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited into a novel. The story revolves around a cast of eccentric characters, who meet at the Tiki Coco, a bar in Los Angeles that holds “Challenging Reality Open Mic” nights for amateur inventors and performers. Eventually, the protagonists get caught up in trying to help Marsyas, a character from ancient Greek mythology that lost his body after being defeated in a music contest against the god Apollo, to recover his voice, his very ancient voice. Unbeknownst to them, this recovery unleashes a disaster… Mime Radio is a novel about how language and perception can be one and the same.
Each live chapter of the novel made use of props, models, costumes, music and sound effects. For the first time, Mime radio (notes for chapter I to XII) presents all the models employed as part of these performances. This series of notes draws a mental landscape of the story told in Mime Radio.

The exhibition Mime radio (notes for chapter I to XII) is on view from Thursday 23 April until Saturday 2 May. On 30 April, a special evening and launch is planned that celebrates Mime Radio in its entirety. Expect music and stories.

Mime Radio by Benjamin Seror is Edited by <o> future <o> and published by: Bat; Adéra; CRAC Alsace; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; and Sternberg Press.

ISBN 978-3-95679-151-2
€ 20

Join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for the long awaited bartending of Gabriel Lester, feat. Smári Rúnar Róbertsson

Doors open at 19.00
Serving Icelandic Brennivin

Lester and Robertsson will make a turn in the groove. But you gotta make it move. The Kunstverein will be packed, stacked and connected. Its gonna be the station. The centre for elevation. Getting down with fresh new creations. Yes a party is over here! Not a party over there! So all come on down, spread that vibe everywhere.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Please join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for
Date Night #1: GAME ♠ WAR ♥ LOVE featuring a karaoke session by Nathan Azhderian.

Doors open at 19.30, karaoke performance from 20.00

“… We all know how this performance is supposed to look, how it’s ‘supposed’ to sound – but the right effect remains elusive. What we get instead is more human, and less Beyoncé; flat notes and forgotten lyrics and awkward pauses in all the wrong places. More than anything else, the raw, messy sensation of expelling sound from our bodies. Sucking down air and then pushing it back up and struggling to shape it, pushing it back out onto the pop-imago like the human grease that spoils the perfect surface of the screen, together.”

With a special contribution by Matkissing Agency, to be discovered inside Kunstverein.

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Please join us this Saturday afternoon, at 5 pm for a talk by Luis Berríos-Negrón, a core collaborator of Paul Ryan’s Threeing at Documenta 13.

His Threeing rugs, developed together with Paul, were on view throughout Kunstverein’s Paul Ryan exhibition.

Luis Berríos-Negrón will be discussing flying carpets, the anxious prop, and his experiences with Paul Ryan and Threeing.

Doors open at 4 pm
Serving cookies and spiked cranberry tea

Luis Berríos-Negrón (Puerto Rico, 1971) focuses on visual arts, material economies, and mass customization through the lens of architecture. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Parsons New School for Design. While at the New School, he was teaching assistant to urban ecologist Jean Gardner, assistant editor/curator to conceptual artist Silvia Kolbowski, and studio assistant to photographer Larry Clark. While at M.I.T., he was teaching assistant to visual artist Antoni Muntadas, and performance artist Joan Jonas. His master’s thesis was co-advised by Dean Adele Santos, and director of the Center for Advance Visual Studies, Krzrysztof Wodiczko, co-read by William Mitchell, then head of the MIT Media Laboratory. He has received various awards, including first prize of the Parsons-Kalil Award for Smart Design 2002, first prize of the M.I.T.-Schnitzer Award for the Visual Arts 2004, and most recently the 2013 Royal Danish Council for the Arts International Visiting Artist stipend. In 2012, he was core collaborator exhibiting in Paul Ryan’s Threeing project at Documenta13, and in Ute Meta Bauer’s Future Archive at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. In 2013, he represents Germany with curator Matthias Böttger in the São Paulo International Biennial for Architecture, and will be in residence at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. From 2011 to 2013, he was Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Institute for Design and Architecture Strategies at the Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Sciences Department of the Technische Universität Braunschweig. In 2013–14, he will be Visiting Lecturer at the Münster University for Applied Sciences. Recent publications include Digital Utopia (Akademie der Künste, Berlin 2012), Space Matters (Ambra Verlag, Vienna 2013), and The Social Design Reader (co-published by Angewandte/ETH/Columbia Universities, Vienna/Zurich/NY 2013). He has an independent practice, is the founder of the Paramodular design group, and of the Anxious Prop art collective. Berríos-Negrón lives and works in Berlin since 2006.

Please join us for the launch and presentation of:

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets

A lecture by Mierle Laderman Ukeles followed by a conversation between the artist and editor Kari Conte.

Monday 23 March, 19.30
Goethe Institut, Herengracht 470, Amsterdam

For reservations please contact the Goethe Institut:
Tel. 020 531 2900
info@amsterdam.goethe.org
Entrance: € 5; for Kunstverein members: € 3; Students: free

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 manifesto “Maintenance Art: Proposal for an Exhibition” was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposition argued for the intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor – a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling, ever since. Starting in 1977, she became an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enabled her to introduce radical public art as mainstream culture into an urban system serving and owned by the municipal population.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets – a series of large-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables – which took place between 1983 and 2012 in Givors, Echigo-Tsumari, New York, Pittsburgh, and Rotterdam.

Edited by Kari Conte
Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen; with 7 chapters written by Mierle Laderman Ukeles; a conversation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson

Co-published by Kunstverein Publishing, Grazer Kunstverein and Sternberg Press in collaboration Arnolfini, Bristol, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Marabouparken, Stockholm. Design by Marc Hollenstein

Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Ukeles completed an undergraduate degree in history and international studies at Barnard and an MA in Interrelated Arts at NYU in 1973. Ukeles’ early work was experimental, and visually and symbolically conveyed the social unrest surrounding events such as the women’s movement and the Vietnam War. Since the 1970s, she has exhibited and performed widely, among others in C7500, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, USA (1973); Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1980, both curated by Lucy Lippard); Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York (1998), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MoMa PS1, New York (2007–2008); Maintenance Art Works 1969–1980, Arnolfini, Bristol, and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (both 2013). Ukeles is currently completing a permanent environmental public art commission for Freshkills Park in NYC, formerly the largest municipal landfill in the world, that will be completed in 2016–2017.
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Kari Conte is a New York-based curator and writer. She is the editor and an author for Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets, published by Sternberg Press, Grazer Kunstverein and Kunstverein Publishing. Since 2010, she has been the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). At ISCP, she leads residencies, exhibitions, and public programs in which she collaborates with more than a hundred artists each year. Previously, she worked at Whitechapel Gallery, London and received an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She has curated or organized over thirty international exhibitions, site-specific commissions and performances including contributions to the Aichi Triennale and Performa Biennial. She has given recent talks at institutions including Art in General, Bard College, Creative Time, Goethe-Institut, Independent Curators International (ICI), Ludwig Museum, Purchase College, and Sharjah Art Foundation.

SPF 15

Co-hosted by Galerie Juliette Jongma with de Ateliers, Upstream Gallery and Galerie Gabriel Rolt participating in the 2015 edition.


Friday 20 March

Upstream Gallery and Galerie Gabriel Rolt will serve drinks from 18.30,
Kunstverein from 19.00.

Marc Bijl
‘Start me up!’
18:45
Location: Intersection Ceintuurbaan/Sarphatipark and Tweede van der Helststraat
During ‘Start me up!’, Marc Bijl waves a chequered flag to lap traffic in De Pijp to a flaming Formule One finale.

Jeroen Jongeleen
‘Running Things’
19:00–20:30
Location: the runs will start at Upstream Gallery and pass by all SPF locations
While people raise their glasses to the arts in De Pijp, tempers are challenged when a group of visitors seem to be plundering the galleries.

House of Makers
‘Looking Back’
19:30 – 20:00
Location: Galerie Gabriel Rolt
Looking Back was created by artists Sterre van Rossem, Peter Leung, Matthew Pawlicki-Sinclair and Clotilde Tran-Phat and will be performed at SP15 as a site-specific work. The work is in its essence fluid and always displaced, forcing the artists to adapt constantly to new circumstances. It is constantly being vandalized and deconstructed in order to make space for a new piece to emerge, adapted to the circumstances of a new environment.

Paul Ryan
‘Threeing Session’ lead by Sevanne Kassarjian
20:00–21:00
Location: Galerie Juliette Jongma
The workshop introduces you to the collaborative practice of Threeing and invites participants to generate ways to make Threeing operative in their work and play. Please sign up via office@kunstverein.nl.

Laurent-David Garnier
‘Cocktail #3 Fast Ice Racing Sand Track – FIRST’
20:00–22:00
Location: Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar (Kunstverein)
Laurent-David Garnier develops the third of his series signature cocktails.

Stefano Faoro
‘I want to write them and say it is not going to last’
22:00
Location: Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar (Kunstverein)
After The Protagonists and The Means, the third and final chapter.
 Spoken words performance, circa 20 minutes.

Karaoke Police
23:00
Location: Tour begins at Kunstverein
Karaoke Police is a touring-game performance led by David Bernstein, Monika Lipšic, Marija Olšauskaitė, Jurgis Paškevičius and other special guests.

23:45
official start of SPRING

Saturday 21 March

The Dogs of Shame
‘Doing the Marina’
starts at 14:00
Location: Museumplein/Museum square and route to Galerie Gabriel Rolt
The public is invited to join the Dogs of Shame in their physically and mentally challenged ‘Doing the Marina’ method. A moving guerrilla performance in public space.

Death Shanties (Lucy Stein, Sybren Renema, Alex Neilson)
16:00-17:00
Location: De Ateliers
Death Shanties is a mixed media free jazz group featuring Alex Neilson (drums), Sybren Renema (sax) and former de Ateliers resident Lucy Stein (painting/ projections). Stein uses primitive devotional images, food stuffs and even her own hair in visceral, highly textured painted projections making Death Shanties a unique and immersive live experience.

Rent the Korean (Jungmyung Lee and Ingo Valente)
17:00–19:00
Location: Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar (Kunstverein)
Rent the Korean will offer you a bizarre experience while Jungmyung Lee and Ingo Valente serve rice balls and vj cooking for welcoming the spring awake from hibernation. It is under an Institutional Package in which there are secretive interactive moments between Rent the Korean and visitors at the Kunstverein.

Peter Schuyff
19:00
Location: Galerie Gabriel Rolt
Neo-minimalistic painter and sculptor Peter Schuyff, will close SPF by performing with his band The Woodwards in the garden of Galerie Gabriel Rolt.

Addresses:

Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132
1073 VX, Amsterdam

Galerie Juliette Jongma
Gerard Doustraat 128a
1073 VX Amsterdam

Galerie Gabriel Rolt
Tolstraat 84
1073 SE Amsterdam

Upstream Gallery
Van Ostadestraat 294
1073 TW Amsterdam

De Ateliers
Stadhouderskade 86
1073 AT Amsterdam

SPF 2015 is made possible through the generous support of Stadsdeel Zuid

Will Holder and Alex Waterman read Robert Ashley
Will Holder and Alex Waterman will be reading an hour of duets from Robert Ashley’s opera’s “Dust” and “Celestial Excursions” as part of the reading tour of YES, BUT IS IT EDIBLE? The music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices.
Edited by Will Holder and Alex Waterman. Published by New Documents, 2014

Location: Theater de Roode Bioscoop, Haarlemmerplein 7
Doors open at 7 p.m. performance starts at 8 p.m.
Tickets €11 and €6 for members (bring you membership card) via www.roodebioscoop.nl or reserve via office@kunstverein.nl

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Dear Participant,

Kunstverein has been interested in the work of Paul Ryan since the summer of 2012. We’ve decided to introduce you to his work via live workshops on Threeing and an eclectic, investigative source book.

Paul Ryan (1943–2013), was a pioneering video artist, writer, teacher and theoretician who worked and lived in New York City. Ryan’s work appeared in the groundbreaking exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969, and he was a member of the Raindance media collective as well as contributor to its seminal video journal Radical Software. Much of Ryan’s theoretical work focuses on triadic behavior – the interrelation of three units or persons – codified by Ryan into the concept of “threeing” as well as the Earthscore Notational System which draws upon video to address issues of ecological sustainability. Paul participated in Documenta 13 with Threeing live sessions. “Paul Ryan’s Threeing is comprised of situations in which three or more people create sustainable, collaborative relationships.”

Kunstverein has invited Sevanne Kassarjian, a professional workshop leader who studied under Paul Ryan, to facilitate a number of sessions on Threeing. Sevanne Kassarjian: “The workshops will introduce you to the collaborative practice of Threeing and invite you to generate ways to make Threeing operative in your work and play. The workshops will combine theory and practice, communication and creativity. Participants will be expected to work with both abstract concepts and the embodiment of those concepts and learn to practice Threeing in both its verbal and nonverbal versions.”

The various workshops/sessions on Threeing will be focused on movement, another on words and another on making a mark. On Sunday 15 March Sevanne will be holding sessions all day, as well as on Monday 16 March. There will be approximately 4 sessions held per day and one session that will take place on Friday 20 March, in the evening, at Galerie Juliette Jongma.

We invite artists, educators, theorists and everyone interested in exploring knew ways to collaborate. Please send an email to office@kunstverein.nl to show your interest in participating and your preferred day and time (feel free to choose more than one session):

March 15: sessions at 12:00; 16:00. Location: Ruyschstraat 4 III
March 16: sessions at 11:00; 14:00; 17:00. Location: Ruyschstraat 4 III
March 20: session starts at 19:00. Location: Galerie Juliette Jongma

On Saturday March 28 there will be a live talk with Berlin based artist Luis Berríos-Negrón, a core collaborator of Paul Ryan’s Threeing at Documenta 13. His Threeing rugs, developed together with Paul, will be used and on view throughout the project. Information here: www.luisberriosnegron.org/ThreeingShedRugs.

More information from Paul’s site: www.earthscore.org/themes
As well on the site, there is the entire lesson plan for how to participate and generate Threeing. Everything is open source and the idea is, once the parameters are understood, that people can interpret and take things where they want them to go.

Sevanne Kassarjian specializes in theatre based education and communication, surfacing opportunities in every interaction. Bringing the tools of improvisation and 20 years on the professional stage to bear on a wide range of themes, including cross-cultural communication, managing uncertainty, and creating learning organizations, Sevanne designs and conducts experiential education programs for corporate and non-profit organizations, supporting clients to expand their repertoire. She has worked with hundreds of independent clients and developed and delivered programs for organizations including the US Olympic Committee, Price Waterhouse Coopers, The House of Chanel, Coca-Cola, Miraval Resort, Global Business Network and the San Diego Police Department. She is the in-house coach in numerous organizations as diverse as American Express, the David Zwirner Gallery and Idealist.org. Sevanne holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

Sevanne Kassarjian and Paul Ryan met because of Paul’s interest in the work of Gregory Bateson, Sevanne’s grandfather. They discovered a mutual interest in re-examining the landscape of our interactions and began a long friendship in which Sevanne supports the spread of Paul’s work on triadic relationships. Paul asked Sevanne to train the 23 people at Documenta 13 who would man Paul’s installation for the entire summer exhibit.

Please join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for
Date Night #0: GAME ♠ WAR ♥ LOVE hosted by The Dutch Oysters Club.*

Oysters and bubbles served from 19.30

“In pre-romantic, pre-modern time marriages or love connections were a matter of relatives, counselors, your uncle, your aunt, and so on … Today is similar, only instead of all those old wise uncles it’s dating agencies and marriage agencies. What they offer is precisely love without the fall, without falling in love, without this totally unpredictable traumatic encounter.” (Slavoj Žižek introducing Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept, 2014)

*For the Date Night #0, the Dutch Oysters Club will be making their first public appearance. The founding members are Dina Danish, Bea McMahon and Emma Panza.

I’m With Her Records and BOB’s YOUR UNCLE presents:

Nancy Acid, live at Ellen de Bruijne

Thursday 19 February

Doors open at 8 p.m.
Gig starts at 8.30 p.m.

Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Rozengracht 207a
1016 LZ Amsterdam

The Performance Programme at Ellen de Bruijne Projects and BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is curated by Dorothé Orczyk.
10 January – 28 February 2015

Salon Hang

Open: 14–28 February
Preview: Saturday 14 February, 6–8 pm

With:

Please join us this Saturday 14 February, for the first annual Members Only Salon Hang.

For the first time in its 5-year history, Kunstverein will be hosting a Salon Hang, open to all and only its esteemed members. The Salon Hang is an exciting out of control event that showcases an abundance of local and international work. At once harking back to the infamous Salons of the past, referencing these full and novel exhibitions that often wrote history, and at the same time, looking forward to what a contemporary art community and self-organization can look like today.

Please join us Thursday 5 February for the radio feature
If loving you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right #3 by Kerstin Cmelka.

A live DJ set and radio broadcast exploring female emotional desires and their attempts of expression in pop music.

Doors open at 7 p.m.
The set starts at 8 p.m.

Serving Negroni Cocktail

and

This Thursday BOB’s YOUR UNCLE’s newest franchise, the BOB’s YOUR UNCLE SPORTS BAR* in Bergen, Norway, will be hosted by Swedish artist Tobias Karlsson. The evening will feature pink cocktails, a soundtrack of 50’s love songs, and a re-enactment of one of Karlsson’s slam poetry performances from the 90’s.

*Appropriated by Amsterdam-based artist Carl Johan Högberg, BOB’s YOUR UNCLE SPORTS BAR is part of the exhibition “Shuttlecock, feat. Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar” at Hordaland Art Centre, curated by Anthea Buys. Read more about the exhibition here.

The Performance Programme at Ellen de Bruijne Projects and BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is curated by Dorothé Orczyk.
10 January – 28 February 2015

BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is designed by Robert Wilhite, open every Thursday, and brings you a special host and special servings each week. Reservations: bobsyouruncle@kunstverein.nl

Join us this Thursday at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE for a screening and Bärenjäger.

Doors open at 7 p.m.
Screening starts at 8 p.m.

A Recess and a Reconstruction
Written and directed by Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet, 2011, 22 min.
With: Rachel Spicer as Hippolyta, Benjamin Seror as Manfred, and Francis Grew.

Somewhat at a loose end, two museum guides in a basement storeroom are marveling at the great resourcefulness of archeological museography. Elsewhere, on an excavation site, an archeologist standing by trenches and mechanical diggers is describing artefacts. Much further along, a young woman imprisoned in the underground recess of a castle lets her terror fantasies run wild. A Recess and a Reconstruction is a Gothic story where the line between what is past and what lies in the future is in the process of disintegrating.

Production I. I. I. I., with the support of Pôle Image Haute Normandie, Cultures France, FRAC Île-de-France, Mairie de Paris, Raven Row. Thanks to Marcelle Alix, Paris. Image: Maria de los Angeles Parrinello, sound: Arthur Beja, Sam Ryan, editing: Clement Tomé, costumes: Martin Hervé, catering: Michèle Monory.

Serving: Bärenjäger (bear hunter). In medieval times, bear hunters would enticing the bears with meschkinnes, a mead-like moonshine made by bee keepers and farmers which was irresistible to bears and humans alike. In the 15th century, the Teucke and Konig Bear Trap Company created the first professionally produced meschkiness (“Bärenjäger”). And it’s still made with natural ingredients using the same methods.

The Performance Programme at Ellen de Bruijne Projects and BOB’s YOUR UNCLE is curated by Dorothé Orczyk.
10 January – 28 February 2015

In collaboration with Kunstverein/ BOB’s YOUR UNCLE* Amsterdam, Ellen de Bruijne Projects presents different performances every week by the following artists:

*Kerstin Cmelka
Jeremiah Day
*Uta Eisenreich & Eva Meyer-Keller
*Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet
I’m With Her Records
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Eva Meyer-Keller
Erkka Nissinen
Janneke van Raaphorst
Geo Wyeth

Please visit Ellen de Bruijne’s website, Facebook as well as Kunstverein’s website to stay updated on the programme.

Join us this Saturday for Nora Turato does Rammellzee
Performance starts at 7 p.m.

Image: Rammellzee, copyright Vincent Vlasblom, NL

World premiere of ‘Shut Up I’m Counting’
Saturday 10 January 2015
At Rialto cinema
Doors open at 11.30 a.m. screening starts at 11.45 a.m.
A blini brunch follows at Bob’s Your Uncle

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Please join us for the premiere of Felix Salut’s extraordinary film ‘Shut Up I’m Counting’, a project on the cutting edge of film and graphic design.
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The movie is a parable of a complex and erratic world. Tara and Ohio are trapped in a reality packed with symbols, systems and fragments. They don‘t know how to escape from it. They are looking for the sign ‘X’ to show them the WAY OUT. Guided by the Oracle with its mysterious riddles, a turbulent adventure story evolves.
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The film is written, directed and produced by Felix Salut and has a duration of 27 min.
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Following the screening there will be a chance to speak with the director, Felix Salut, at Bob’s Your Uncle, and share in some Blinis and Cava. As well, we will be showing and playing the game Galapagos, as featured in the film.
–

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Tickets including blinis and cava: 5 EUR
As seating is limited, please send an email to reserve to office@kunstverein.nl (members have priority).

SOLD OUT
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The experimental film script of ‘Shut Up I’m Counting’ was published by Spector Books in 2014. It was awarded the Walter-Tiemann-Preis, a prize for innovative book design and typography.
–
Duration: 27 min
Director: Felix Salut
Camera, Animation & Sound: Simon Krahl
Tara: Tara Khan
Ohio: Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
The Oracle: Karen Røise Kielland
Dot: voice by Yotam Haber
The Voice: Wendy Taylor
Magic Child: Noah Weigand
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Rialto cinema
Ceintuurbaan 338, Amsterdam
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This project was made possible by the generous support of AFK and supporters of wemakeit.ch. Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Please join us for the Kunstverein Christmas party with Santa Robert Wilhite serving Santa’s Crutch.

Friday 19 December, from 7.30 pm.

This Thursday 4 December, BOB’s YOUR UNCLE will host a triple special:

• The Exhibitionist serves The Pete – a non-controversial cocktail.

• Adam Pendleton reads Hannah Weiner – from afar.

• And Kari Cwynar of Kunstverein Toronto launches KVT’s first publication:
a new edition of Schneemann’s iconic artist’s book, Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976), published in conjunction with the exhibition Dear Carolee: Carolee Schneemann in Letters (on from November 27 – January 10).

Doors open at 19.30.

We’ll be playing some Rammellzee. Poems welcome.

Doors open at 19.30

Please note that space is limited so it will be first come first serve and members will have priority.

Hannah Weiner and Rammellzee
29 November 2014 – 31 January 2015

Preview: Friday 28 November, 5–8 pm

The show is about two people who use language/words and even letters in their very own way. Rammellzee liberated letters from their enslaved status in the alphabet so that they could do battle. And Weiner saw words in the air and on people.

We’ll have paintings by Rammellzee and books by Weiner.

Image: Rammellzee, copyright Vincent Vlasblom, NL

Events:
28 November: Tommy Oost live
4 December: Adam Pendleton reads Hannah Weiner
& January 2015: Nora Turato reads Rammellzee

Eau de Cologne
27 September, from 5–10 pm
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Hosted by Gallery Juliètte Jongma and Kunstverein.
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With k.i. beyoncé, Bisou de Saddam, Michiel Ceulers and Anthony Salvador, Echo + Seashell, Laurent-David Garnier, Richard John Jones, Nancy Acid, Ana Navas, and introducing I’m With Her Records. Hot dogs by Ron Blaauw.
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Eau de Cologne is an anti-fashion show and a raw punk, fuzz-pop festival.
0
Eau de Cologne takes its name from Monika Sprüth’s radical female only in-house gallery magazine by the same title, published only three times between 1985–1993.
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Line-up
5 pm Ana Navas, around Gerard Douplein and at Kunstverein
———-–Michiel Ceulers and Anthony Salvador, at Juliètte Jongma
———–Laurent-David Garnier, in Bob’s Your Uncle
———–k.i. beyoncé, on Gerard Douplein
———–I’m With Her Records, in I’m With Her Records
7 pm Richard John Jones, on Gerard Douplein
8 pm Echo + Seashell, on Gerard Douplein
9 pm Bisou de Saddam unplugged, in Bob’s Your Uncle
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Thanks to Stadsdeel Zuid and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst as well as Kunstverein’s (Gold) members. Special thanks to Monika Sprüth.

K-tanglement
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14 September 2014, 8pm
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On September 14 at 8pm in Amsterdam and Milano and at 2pm New York and Toronto time, a simultaneous hypnosis performance will be held under the glow of giant billboard screens in NY, Toronto, Amsterdam and Milan. Following on from and inspired by “Color Therapy”, a project that brings abstract visuals and sounds that counterbalance weather and social traffic flows at these 4 locations, K-tanglement is a project that seeks to decolonize the mind from the sense of unitary location. Participants will be invited to listen to an audio that enables them to enter a trance state in which their unconscious minds will be invited to dematerialize, decontextualize themselves from the surrounding branding, dissolve into color-based emotions and finally develop a sense of simultaneous entanglement with participants in the other 3 cities.

If you would like to participate please register here.

K-tanglement : a project by Marcos Lutyens in collaboration with Kunstverein Toronto, Milan, New York and Amsterdam.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid.

Eau de Cologne magazines
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5 September – 4 October 2014
Opening: 4 September 7-9pm
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In February 1983, Monika Sprüth opened her first gallery in Cologne. Advocating the talents of then-emerging artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel, Sprüth countered a “Cologne over-run by male artists” with a gallery focused on women. Emblematic of this perspective is Sprüth’s publishing venture Eau de Cologne: an “effervescent, shape-shifting magazine, featuring almost exclusively women artists and art practitioners – which she published, with accompanying exhibitions, three times between 1985 and 1993”.

The presentation at Kunstverein of these historic publications prefaces the EAU DE COLOGNE event, which will be held on September 27.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid. Special thanks to Monika Sprüth and Ahrend.

Axel Wilhite
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5 September – 4 October 2014
Opening: 4 September 7–9 pm
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Menko is a Japanese children’s game played with small cards (similar to baseball cards) elaborately decorated with samurais and other notable historical figures instead of athletes. Axel Wilhite paints on top of these illustrations, sometimes adding to the original image by adding a hat or a flower to a samurai in warrior stance. On other cards, he completely erases the original image, reducing it to its bare lines and then making it anew. Wilhite began working with Menko cards in Chiba, Japan, where he lived for a year while attending school and studying kendo, the art of Japanese swordsmanship. It helped him deal with loneliness of being in a foreign country. “At first, it was something I did for the benefit of my dorm mates, who were also foreigners in Japan,” he says. “Painting the Menko cards is my way of connecting with Japanese culture.”

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members and Stadsdeel Zuid. Special thanks to Ahrend.

There’s only two Alex Bailey’s
25–29 June 2014

Dear Maxine

I imagine you’re duly impressed, if not ‘weak at the knees’ by the photograph i’ve attached. It also shows TWO of the works i’ll be exhibiting. I consider the show as ’stuffing works’ down every orifice of the space. Much like a Gang Bang.

Kindest of Regards

Alex Bailey

 

The exhibition features work from Michael Bailey (UK), Alex Bailey (UK), Robert Chilton (UK), A Donkey (NL) and an amateur painting from deceased footballer George Best (NI).

Friday 27th June, 7pm, performance at Café Van Wou, Van Woustraat 25.

There’s only two Alex Bailey’s is part of A Festival of Choices, Master of Fine Arts Graduation 2014, Sandberg Instituut, 25–29 June 2014, various locations throughout Amsterdam. A Festival of Choices emphasizes upon the relationship and choices made between the graduating student and the diverse range of institutions and organizations offered within the cultural landscape of Amsterdam. For more information and the full program, please check www.festivalofchoices.nl

Mime Radio, The Final Chapters
Mime Radio is an orally written novel by Benjamin Seror.

“This is the story of an ancient voice. This is the story of how Marsyas, poor Marsyas recovered his voice millions of years after having lost it.”

Chapter X
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Doors open at 7 pm, performance starts at 7.30pm

Chapter XI
Friday, 20 June 2014
Doors open at 7 pm, performance starts at 7.30pm

Chapter XII
Thursday, *26 June 2014
*Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Teijin Auditorium
Performance starts at 8pm

The story begins in a bar located in Los Angeles, the Tiki Coco. The bar is the center of the story where every night, a group of people attend the “Challenging Reality Open Mic” during which the audience is invited to take the microphone to present some new tools, techniques or ideas that could extend reality or at least shake at it a bit. This meeting will see the growing friendship between four characters, Angie, Bernhard, Benjamin and David, who move together to the Solog House built by one of them in the Hudson River Valley. This is also where they discover they have been followed by Marsyas, a character from ancient Greek mythology that lost his body after being defeated in a music contest against the god Apollo. The characters proceed to help Marsyas to recover his voice, his very ancient voice, without knowing what disaster this recovery could unleash.

Each chapter of the novel had been relayed orally through a cycle of improvised performances that are then transcribed to be later published in their entirety. One of the main concerns of this project is the use of a public event as a possible writing technique. Mime Radio follows on the principles of Cinema Vérité as described by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin when collaborating on Chroniques d’un été (1960), a film about the impact of different camera movements on a given situation. In this and other Cinema Vérité films, the audience replaces the camera and the central question becomes: What would change for an author if s/he were to write a story directly addressed to a particular audience?

The core subject of this novel is language itself: What are the possibilities of words, and how can they be used in the most efficient ways to make things happen? The question is also paramount to all the different protagonists of the story who come together at the Tiki Coco. At this bar, they organize nightly events where they stretch the limits of language to describe tools that challenge reality. Most of the characters that appear in the novel come from other novels such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as living artists with whom Seror is in dialogue.

Please make your reservations up until one day before each performance via office@kunstverein.nl. Please note that members have priority.

Fellow Traveler

31 May – 22 June 2014

Opening: 30 May 7–10 pm

From 31 May until 22 June a selection of publications by Kunstverein Publishing will be on display at Zirkumflex, Berlin, organised in collaboration with Kunstverein Milano.

The selection of publications, will include our latest releases, ‘The LIP Anthology’ and ‘The Correspondence Book’.

Zirkumflex Fontanestraße 25 12049 Berlin –

More information you find here or at http://www.zirkumflex.com.

Launch Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation)

Kunstverein presents on 4 September – in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam – a reading by Will Holder on the occasion of the reprint of Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif, with the first full translation of the material in English.

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Between 1932 and 1936 five edition of the cahier Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif was published in Paris by the eponymous association, uniting all movements who worked abstractly. The magazine not only formalised a new tendency for language in visual art, but also became a form of explicit self-promotion and opposition against the growing force of figurative Surrealism, led by André Breton. Two minimal yet clear criteria needed to be fulfilled to become a member of the association: you had to be an artist and work non-figuratively. This resulted in a list of members of long-forgotten artists mingled with names such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Calder, Delaunay, Van Doesburg and Brancusi.
A year after the establishment of the association the first issue of the cahier Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif was published. Most of the members handed in documentation of work along with self-written texts. Those writings were visions about their own work, detailed explanations of the documentation, short viewing instructions, epistles about the true meaning of abstract art, essays on the relation between abstract art and evolution, straight forward explanations why a locomotive is not a work of art, and a poem about God being a copycat.

During the launch in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Will Holder will lead a small audience through the Museum’s galleries, stopping to read writings from Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif to paintings and sculpture by their authors.

The publication is an initiative of Riet Wijnen and published by Kunstverein Publishing.

The readings will take place on 4 September at 7 – 7.30 pm, 8 – 8.30 pm, and 9 – 9.30 pm at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Reservation is required. Please send an e-mail to reservations@stedelijk.nl, including your preferred time slot.

Afterwards there will be drinks at BOB’s YOUR UNCLE.

Kunstverein wishes to thank its (Gold) members, Stadsdeel Zuid, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Stichting Stokroos and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.