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

Opening night: 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.

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)

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.

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.

Announcement

After 10 years*, co-founding director Maxine Kopsa will be leaving Kunstverein. But in good hands: Yana Foqué will be taking over as director and Kunstverein is seeking a new associate curator, to begin in September 2019. Kopsa: ‘It’s time to pass on the baton. I am extremely proud and satisfied with the work done thus far and excited to see a new generation take on the next ten years. Kunstverein fulfills a crucial part in the cultural landscape of the city and has built up a solid network internationally. In these difficult times, I believe Kunstverein’s role as cultural generator for reflection and conversation on an intimate yet global level can only expand.’

*Kunstverein was founded in 2009 by Maxine Kopsa and Krist Gruijthuijsen.

New position of Associate Curator to begin in September 2019

Deadline for application: April 30
Position: Associate Curator

Kunstverein (Amsterdam) is seeking an Associate Curator who will be responsible for two of the four main projects taking place annually. We are looking for a candidate who has affinity with our mission and our program, is a critical thinker, a keen problem-solver and capable of working independently as well as being part of our team.

The associate curator will be making a substantial contribution to the overall program of Kunstverein, with projects that are free in form and can vary from a series of events, to an exhibition or focus on a publication.

The candidate should have a relevant degree or equivalent experience in an equal position. A minimum of 2 years experience in arts administration, programming or a related field is a basic requirement. Our ideal candidate would possess a broad knowledge of activities in contemporary art and related fields on a global level, as well as maintain an extensive global professional network. They would have excellent communication skills, written and oral, as well as exceptional attention to detail, including proofreading and editing capabilities.

We want to underline that you do not need to be based in the Netherlands to apply, nor does the chosen candidate need to relocate to the Netherlands.

Job Description

As Associate Curator you would:

1. In close dialogue with the director, coordinate exhibitions/publications/events related to your annual projects. Including: conducting research, reaching out to the artist(s), acquiring permissions, coordinating the preparation of contracts and loan agreements.

2. Hold a bimonthly (skype) meeting with the director and assistant curator to maintain an inspiring level of exchange and feedback.

3. Track and report on program expenditures and budget; you are in charge of additional funding applications specific to your projects.

4. Oversee exhibition planning and production; ensure set up by working with appropriate staff, coordinating artwork traffic including shipping and insurance.

5. Be in charge of press and communication. This includes writing press releases, and reaching out to appropriate media channels for coverage, overseeing promotional material, newsletter and label copy, deliberating signage and campaign with our graphic designer, organising documentation, etc.

6. Maintain a broad and current knowledge of activities in contemporary art and related fields on a global level; as well as an extensive global professional network.

Salary

We offer a per project fee that would be paid out on a quarterly basis. Details to be discussed during the interview.

Procedure

Interested candidates should submit a letter of motivation, with a short description of at least one potential project; a curriculum vitae; and two references (including contact information) by APRIL 30, 2019.

Applications from candidates from all over the world are welcomed and encouraged. The Associate Curator will be selected by a committee consisting of Maxine Kopsa, Riet Wijnen and Yana Foqué and invited for an interview on MAY 18. The job would begin September 1, 2019.

Please submit your application to office@kunstverein.nl with as subject line: ASSOCIATE CURATOR + YOUR NAME

We look forward to hearing from you,
Kunstverein

In the words of Zadie Smith: “The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
Wishing you all a great end of the year, and the start of a new one.

Happy Holidays,
Kunstverein