29.04.2010 - 27.06.2010

Enigma

Lorenzo Casali, Martina Florians, Marcha van den Hurk, Juul Kraijer, Joris Kuipers, Lieke Snellen

From April 29 to June 27, TENT presents video installations, drawings, sculptures and photographs by six Rotterdam-based artists whose work does not avoid the inexplicable and unfathomable. Enigma offers a view of a complex, fanciful world without the foothold of logic. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, 'unknown terrain' is increasingly difficult to find. Google leaves no part of the earth unobserved, no archive unopened and no theory unpublished. And still there must be moments, places and people, who avoid the assignment of meaning; that exist without us knowing them. Enigma is not an exhibition that provides answers, but which poses questions.

Lorenzo Casali's video installations have an ephemeral character. Shadows and spots of light dance across a wall without ever forming a recognizable picture. Casali filmed the light entering the space, casting its shadows in empty rooms, on abandoned furniture or flaking layers of plaster. They become shadows of a disappearing past.

The laboratory-like set-ups of Martina Florians often strike an absurdist tone. Florians is not engaged in science. Instead she uses objects, odours, liquids and humour to tell personal stories, or she offers solutions that turn out not to be solutions at all. Her installation in TENT is based on an anecdote about a Slovak sausage maker, who creatively managed to evade the European regulations.

The work of Marcha van der Hurk typically features vagrants, the anonymous figures that inhabit large cities. Non-conformist, independent and unpredictable, the vagrant withdraws from society. In Van den Hurk's photographs and sculptures, the figure of the vagrant becomes an anonymous form, an object that stands midway between a human figure and a landscape element, between dreamed and real life.

Mysterious women, merged with nature, emerge from the paper in Juul Kraijer's refined drawings. These are creatures of nature that escaped from mythology and which have their origins in art history and Indian miniatures. For some years now Kraijer has also been making ceramic sculptures and videos, a number of which are shown in the exhibition.

The spectacular cutout paper wall reliefs and drawings by Joris Kuipers appropriate so much space that the observer is absorbed by them, almost becoming part of them. A tangle of light-red forms appears to stream down the wall, has no beginning or end. The game with size and scale and the uncontrolled growth of indefinable forms evokes a sensation in which fear of the unknown alternates with curiosity for the unknown.

After graduating from the Piet Zwart Institute (2007), Lieke Snellen's artistic practice soon developed towards autonomous sculpture, in which questions on the basic principles of sculptural art and medium-specificity (referring to the well-known art critic Rosalind Krauss) play an important role. The sculpture presents itself as autonomous, free of any direct reference, coagulated in a precarious balance between the surreal and the realistic, the banal and the spectacular, the aesthetic and the conceptual.

The exhibition will be opened with a DJ-set by Mietze B.