My Travels with Barry | Piet Zwart Institute - TENT Rotterdam

Inger Alfnes, Maja Bekan, Egle Budvytyte, Gunndís Yr Finnbogadóttir, Jacqueline Forzelius, Gerwin Luijendijk, Margo Onnes, Terje Øverås, Mirjana Stojadinovic, Edward Clydesdale Thomson, Esmé Valk, Esther de Vlam, Sjoerd Westbroek

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Fellow travelers
Imagine being lost in transit, stuck in an odd place together with a guy named Barry. He’s more of the silent type. But once she gets going, it’s hard to stop her. She will speak about the future, the past and the place she is from, in ways which aren’t that easy to comprehend. She talks in images, allusions and ciphers. Sometimes she gesticulates so intensely that her gestures seem like they are part of a ballet of sorts. Conversing with Barry becomes like performing some kind of choreography together.

After a while there are moments when you feel you catch his drift and get his jokes. Was he even joking? With Barry it’s difficult to tell. But there are some things you have in common: you both love Hitchcock and you’d do anything to leave this place behind. So you go, you travel with Barry to magical and mysterious places. Other times you just go for coffee or a walk in the park. The exact nature of your travels is difficult to describe. You might say, they feel a bit like two years at an art school and one exhibition. (Jan Verwoert)

About the artists
Mirjana Boba Stojadinovic was born in Yugoslavia. Or in Serbia. She was born in a country where the pro-visionality of space is well understood. Her work explored how memories of the place we are from can inform our understanding of the space we travel to.

Gunndís Yr Finnbogadóttir used the gally as a site to explore a domestic space (her mother-in-law’s kitchen) and a workspace (her studio). Both are sites of production.

Jacqueline Forzelius opened an agency. It was trying its best to provide a service. Something to do with communication. What service exactly was offered remained unclear, yet somehow visitors found themselves to become participants.

Terje Øverås produced a prose poem: a ‘pataphysical journey charted with an Oulipian map.’ He also created various contexts in which the text could be read.

A look-alike of 1960s TV heroine Emma Peel wandered through the set of Margo Onnes’ video piece. But the individual shots appeared randomly reshuffled. Worlds folded into each other, time cycles and characters shifted.

Sjoerd Westbroek explored the paradox of drawing: at the very moment something is depicted, that thing disappears behind the opaque surface of the drawing. This game of cat and mouse between experience and representation, becomes more pertinent when an image is projected. What form of presence, Westbroek seemed to ask, is preserved when the image simply hangs in light?

Edward Clydesdale Thomson investigated how sites such as zoos, ornamental gardens or peep shows are constructed as tableaus. How is the viewer’s attention directed, or their expectation of what they might expect to see confirmed? He used both the camera and descriptions for his analysis.

In Inger Alfnes‘ photographs, something uncanny is attached to familiar objects or landscapes. The blade of a saw sticks out of a remote frozen lake. The object seems to take on a form approaching human. A dark spirit seems to hide behind a mask of formal beauty.

Egle Budvytyte‘s videos told magical stories that might be true. She discovered that fish emit messages that human beings can decipher. Their signals swim through the air at a previously unde-tectable frequency.

Maja Bekan was fascinated by the history of leisure. While workers once chased across the continent in pursuit of the sun, today sun beds and spray tans are brought into our homes. Her installation conflated the space of the tanning machine and the classic summer holiday in a seductive technological narration.

Esther de Vlam was interested in how we begin to make something from the bare minimum. How do we depart from zero? How does a crisis (a war or poverty, for instance) become normality?

In video, performance and sculpture, Gerwin Luijendijk explored the various properties of the home, the studio, or ‘nature’. He combined elements that allude to familiar modernistic tropes with things from the everyday world.

Esmé Valk was interested in social choreography: the study of behaviour between social and non-social agents. In the process, Valk concluded that she herself, as the observer, could not remain outside the phenomenon she observed. She adopted a methodology that reflected this reality.