Alexis Blake, Jérémie Boyard, Ruth Buchanan, Angeline Dekker, Deirdre M. Donoghue, Rafael Freyre Mendieta, Ruth Legg, Lieke Snellen, Niels Vis
Ruth Legg (UK) worked with artistic materials or ideas that seem exhausted – used up, like a joke that has been told too often. She explored ways of restaging these cliché materials, and finding potential in their exhausted condition.
Ruth Buchanan (NZ) engages in intimate, often humorous, negotiations with the artistic legacies that also influence her own work. She searches for ways in which inherited artistic approaches and meanings can be received and reanimated.
Deirdre M. Donoghue (FI/IE) explored how memory unfolds in the here and now of a social encounter. She brought together family members that had not seen each other for years, and directed a setting that activated a negotiation of personal, collective and official histories.
Working with artists from Rotterdam’s HipHopHouse, Alexis Blake (US) explored the paradoxes of how one develops one’s own self-image and creates a space of one’s own in a subculture that has, by now, become commercialised and institutionalised.
The work of Rafael Freyre Mendieta (PE) sprang from his experience of being a migrant. Moving between autobiography and fiction, he developed nostalgic narratives around memories of home. Europe appeared not to be the promised paradise of a free and nomadic subjectivity. He was awarded the annual Promotion Prize for this project.
Jérémie Boyard (FR) roamed the city of Rotterdam with his camera. Persistently looking down, at the micro-level of the pavement, he discovered leftovers and accidents, with which he traced the utopian idea of a city under continuous de- and reconstruction.
Angeline Dekker (NL) views buildings as organisms, subject to time and change, even to mortality. She works with abandoned buildings, wresting doors and floorboards from the derelict architectural skeleton, to create precarious installations. At TENT, she made a site-specific installation.
Lieke Snellen (NL) explored the relationships between the human body and functional objects. She worked on location in semi-public spaces, such as a school or an office, setting up exercises to explore how these spaces choreograph the movement of the people within them.
Niels Vis (NL) explored the experience offered by virtual spaces, like Second Life. How do we interrelate with physical and fictional spaces when the borders separating them seem to be disappearing? He recreated Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona pavilion in second life, and extended the virtual space into the gallery.
artists
Alexis Blake, Jérémie Boyard, Ruth Buchanan, Angeline Dekker, Deirdre M. Donoghue, Rafael Freyre Mendieta, Ruth Legg, Lieke Snellen, Niels Vis