In a World We Can't See included premieres of new monumental video installations by Margo Onnes and Arthur Kleinjan, and impressive multimedia presentations by Ine Lamers and Anoek Steketee. The four artists each use the camera in their own idiosyncratic way to depict a deeper reality behind the superficial reality.
Kleinjan, Lamers, Onnes and Steketee use the surreal atmosphere and logic of magical-realistic stories, memories and dreams. In doing so, they portray the collective subconscious that lurks beneath the surface of everyday life, they probe existential human fears and desires, and they explore potential alternative realities.
The tension between the visible and invisible reality becomes tangible through the special use of photography and film, narrative structures and music. The exhibition strengthened the dreamlike impact of the works by immersing the viewer in a nocturnal atmosphere.
Each of the works on display revolved around events and issues from today and the recent past, but approached them from a search for deeper layers, without judgement and without a desire for current events. Implicitly, the fascination for a deeper or possible other reality that these artists share offers a different sound than our current fixation on fake news, made-up stories and alternative facts, which currently seems to dominate our dealings with reality.
Margo Onnes strings together images and symbols from our collective memory according to the logic of a dream. She presented 'All Along the Watchtower', which was inspired by a famous song from the 60s, in which Bob Dylan used biblical and mythical imagery to express the atmosphere of impending doom from that time. This song has already had many musical reinterpretations. Onnes translated Dylan's enigmatic vision to the present time. In addition to dark dream images, there is a leading role for music and dance, for which Onnes entered into a special collaboration with the psychedelic electro-folk band Half Way Station and dancers from Conny Janssen Dances.
Arthur Kleinjan presented his video triptych, 'Above Us Only Sky'. A narrator takes us along in a magical-realistic history in which nothing is made up. His story begins with an investigation into a plane crash in communist Czechoslovakia, in which one woman survived after an improbable fall from the sky. From there, a web of connections unfolds between seemingly unrelated events that turn out to be intertwined at many points. Kleinjan cleverly plays with the surreal logic of coincidence, repetition and synchronicity. Impressive images of natural disasters and silent witnesses to forgotten histories reinforce the impression that reality is governed by forces and laws that go beyond a rational worldview.
Ine Lamers explores the surface of visible reality with photography and film. She presented her project about the Siberian city of Zheleznogorsk, founded during the Cold War to secretly produce plutonium and rockets. Closed to the outside world and not listed on any official map, the city was the realization of the socialist utopia for those who were allowed to work there. The current residents chose to keep their city closed. Any research into the atomic city is forbidden. Lamers has been circling this impenetrable place with her camera for years, like Tarkovsky's Stalker in the Zone or Kafka's K around The Castle, whereby the hidden city is always seen in a different light.
Anoek Steketee presented 'Love Radio', a project about social trauma and the role of media. Hate radio played an important role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands were killed. The popular radio soap Musekeweya (New Dawn) has been broadcast on the same frequency since 2004, with a hopeful message of love and reconciliation. Can fiction bring people together? Can imagination lay the foundation for a new society? Steketee raised these questions with photos and a video installation of listeners who seem to be immersed in the parallel reality of the radio play. With her theatrical approach, Steketee creates documentary images that simultaneously evoke an inner and outer reality.