Rossella Biscotti presented her new film The Sun Shines, which revolves around the Russian filmmaker Shevchenko. In 1986 he was one of the first to arrive at the scene after the Chernobyl disaster, to record its devastating effects. Mysterious white spots appeared on his role of film, the result of harmful radiation released during the disaster; visible evidence of this all too invisible phenomenon that the Russian government would rather have denied.
Research is an essential part of the artistic practice of Susanne Kriemann. She presented the results of her research on the political-ideological issues surrounding a monumental statue of the pharaoh Ramses, on public display in Cairo. The sculpture has suffered greatly from air pollution. The city council faced the following dilemma: should the statue remain on its spot as a symbol of a proud Egypt, or should it be conserved in a museum as a symbol of a bygone age?
Toine Klaassen used TENT for his Laboratory of Contemporary Archaeology (Laboratorium Voor Hedendaagse Archeologie). Klaassen draws attention to the poetry of the unsightly, the small, and neglected. He collects discarded objects from his surroundings with no predetermined plan, and subsequently uses these in his work. Often the work is created in the presence of the public in a performance setting, in which he makes no attempt to avoid the absurd. Or as Klaassen himself states: ’If you catch a butterfly in your hands the powder on its wings will brush off leaving just a tattered rag.’
Boris van Hoof‘s Moving Portrait was an ingenious installation in which the 16mm film projector plays a central role. Three projectors play filmstrips in an endless loop. The strips are re-routed around a large structure of metal pipes. The picture is an empty image, meaningless, until a face emerges out of the combination of scratch lines, the face of Boris van Hoof. Van Hoof employed the nostalgia associated with celluloid in a plea for authenticity and unicity.
In spite of its object-like character, the work of Axel Reusch can still just about be regarded as painting. The work is inaccessible and unfathomable. Some objects are wall-mounted, while others stand on the floor, or lean against the wall. The world that Reusch represents is intimate and close. He refers to things from everyday life, objects from the street or in the home. Light, shadow, space, they are not depicted but created using basic means.
Lizan Freijsen‘s works in TENT could be regarded as subtle exhibition design and parasitic intervention. Freijsen has been working for years on a stain archive, a collection of damp patches and fungi derived from existing stains in the houses of Rotterdam. Clinging parasitically to the architecture of TENT, the stains left a connecting trail through the spaces. They are signs of decay, of a nature that can never be tamed, transformed into an unusual source of beauty, irritation, or inspiration