Can’t Hear My Eyes
07 Apr - 18 May 2013
CAN’T HEAR MY EYES
7 April - 18 May 2013
The exhibition Can’t Hear My Eyes shows a number of works with sculptural and painterly connotations, dimensions and properties: to evoke their seemingly static nature and surface in light of the work’s inherent – and consequently invisible and not directly sensible – dynamics, through the format of an exhibition, in two given spaces. It does so in order to test the potential of the work of art in the key of current tendencies within our information culture. The given fact that we have grown more and more accustomed to hard facts as based on transparent, ascertainable (‘checkable’) and ‘democratic’ sources of information and modes of communication; and the surge for clear–cut definitions to indicate the parts that surround us, has lead to, one could argue, an incongruity between works of art and the way we generally organise and conceive of our lives.
Can’t Hear My Eyes proposes to assess the viewer’s position – the witness and perceiver of the event: the space, the exhibition, the artworks – by foregrounding the potentiality of perception and the distribution of the sensible by means of ‘showing, not telling’. In so doing, it avoids didactic and explanatory devices in order to emphasize, and hopefully stimulate modes of perception and awareness for the artworks’ surfaces, tactility, their material qualities and characteristics, and moreover to think the inherent processes of application, the mental and physical application of the possibilities and languages of painting and sculptural elements as allocated to physicalities; the performative and dynamic parts that have become part of the works by preceding actions and that are evoked through the act of making.
Ultimately, the exhibition implies a certain movement – albeit its seeming tranquility and delay – towards an understanding of material as information: it is an invitation to engage in a close reading of surfaces, of speaking through volumes and images rather than ‘know–what’ (facts). In that, the exhibition is not structured around a specific theme, but is rather an analogy of artistic approaches and practices in which the artworks shape the exhibition through internal self–organisation, the process mostly coming from the artworks and the spaces themselves.
Can't Hear My Eyes is the result of the NoguerasBlanchard Curatorial Open Call 2013.
The exhibition will take place at NoguerasBlanchard spaces in Barcelona and Madrid and forms part of the Jugada a 3 Bandas gallery event.
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (Rotterdam, 1988) is a writer and curator that lives and works between London and Rotterdam. He holds a BA in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Utrecht, and an MA in Curating from the London Metropolitan University, delivered in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery. He has worked at a number of institutions including SMBA (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam) and DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation). Recent exhibition projects include Artists of the No, Projektraum Viktor Bucher as part of Curated by Vienna 2012, Vienna (2012); Reading Complex, Seventeen Gallery, The Government Art Collection, The Showroom, AND Publishing, London (2012); Swedenborg Epic, Brockmer House, London (2012). He edited the anthology and hypothetical catalogue None of the Above (2011) on curating and the curatorial in the key of fiction. His publications include, among others, 'Untitled' (Constants Are Changing) on the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, published in 2010. In 2012 he was the recipient of the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award.
7 April - 18 May 2013
The exhibition Can’t Hear My Eyes shows a number of works with sculptural and painterly connotations, dimensions and properties: to evoke their seemingly static nature and surface in light of the work’s inherent – and consequently invisible and not directly sensible – dynamics, through the format of an exhibition, in two given spaces. It does so in order to test the potential of the work of art in the key of current tendencies within our information culture. The given fact that we have grown more and more accustomed to hard facts as based on transparent, ascertainable (‘checkable’) and ‘democratic’ sources of information and modes of communication; and the surge for clear–cut definitions to indicate the parts that surround us, has lead to, one could argue, an incongruity between works of art and the way we generally organise and conceive of our lives.
Can’t Hear My Eyes proposes to assess the viewer’s position – the witness and perceiver of the event: the space, the exhibition, the artworks – by foregrounding the potentiality of perception and the distribution of the sensible by means of ‘showing, not telling’. In so doing, it avoids didactic and explanatory devices in order to emphasize, and hopefully stimulate modes of perception and awareness for the artworks’ surfaces, tactility, their material qualities and characteristics, and moreover to think the inherent processes of application, the mental and physical application of the possibilities and languages of painting and sculptural elements as allocated to physicalities; the performative and dynamic parts that have become part of the works by preceding actions and that are evoked through the act of making.
Ultimately, the exhibition implies a certain movement – albeit its seeming tranquility and delay – towards an understanding of material as information: it is an invitation to engage in a close reading of surfaces, of speaking through volumes and images rather than ‘know–what’ (facts). In that, the exhibition is not structured around a specific theme, but is rather an analogy of artistic approaches and practices in which the artworks shape the exhibition through internal self–organisation, the process mostly coming from the artworks and the spaces themselves.
Can't Hear My Eyes is the result of the NoguerasBlanchard Curatorial Open Call 2013.
The exhibition will take place at NoguerasBlanchard spaces in Barcelona and Madrid and forms part of the Jugada a 3 Bandas gallery event.
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (Rotterdam, 1988) is a writer and curator that lives and works between London and Rotterdam. He holds a BA in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Utrecht, and an MA in Curating from the London Metropolitan University, delivered in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery. He has worked at a number of institutions including SMBA (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam) and DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation). Recent exhibition projects include Artists of the No, Projektraum Viktor Bucher as part of Curated by Vienna 2012, Vienna (2012); Reading Complex, Seventeen Gallery, The Government Art Collection, The Showroom, AND Publishing, London (2012); Swedenborg Epic, Brockmer House, London (2012). He edited the anthology and hypothetical catalogue None of the Above (2011) on curating and the curatorial in the key of fiction. His publications include, among others, 'Untitled' (Constants Are Changing) on the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, published in 2010. In 2012 he was the recipient of the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award.