Between The Map and The Territory
06 Sep - 05 Nov 2012
BETWEEN THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY
Bik Van Der Pol, Maaike Gouwenberg & Joris Lindhout, Karin Hueber, Anna Okrasko, Elian Somers, Emily Whitebread
6 September – 5 November 2012
Between the Map and the Territory is an exhibition inspired by a book. In 2010 the French author Michel Houellebecq wrote his bestselling novel The Map and the Territory. Its title is derived from the assertion made by Polish linguist Alfred Korzybski, ‘The map is not the territory’. The map-territory relationship describes the impossible relationship between a location and the representation of that location, such as the relationship between a city and its map. In his book, Houellebecq uses the fictional course of a successful artist’s life as the framework for a series of essay-like observations on the failure of the capitalist system and the decline of modernism. But also in the reality of the Twenty-teens, increasing numbers of writers and theorists are attempting to think beyond modernism. How can these attempts make a difference when The Map is Not the Territory and the relationship between words and reality is an impossible one?
Between the Map and the Territory manifests itself as a frame story for a number of artists who address our complex relationship to modernism, capitalism and citizenship in the contemporary city, in a productive, but also deliberately evasive way.
In 2011 Bik Van der Pol wrote the influential essay Work To Do for TENT, on the prospects for the arts in the big city. Has Rotterdam become a shrinking city with nothing to lose? For many years, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol have been prominent standard bearers for an artistic practice that reaches further than just the exhibition space. The meaning of their art becomes manifest in symposia, educational programmes, exhibition concepts and essays. In TENT, they place a monumental scoreboard with letter-cards. The board is animated live by assistants who constantly change the modular text elements to spell out a number of abstract idioms, quotes and maxims. The profusion of texts activates the observer into thinking and, thus, is also a plea for language as an important form of capital in today’s knowledge economy.
The Swiss artist Karin Hueber graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel in 2005 and has lived and worked alternately in Rotterdam, Berlin and Basel since 2006. Hueber’s work consists of installations of architectural elements that are apparently waiting to be used, as pieces of scenery for a stage production, as attributes for a performance. Elements are bent, folded, doubled, reversed or enlarged. Hueber's interest in the differences and similarities in the languages of architecture and sculpture results in precise compositions that create conflicting sensations, oscillating between the physical and mental experience of space.
For some time now, Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout have been conducting joint research into ‘gothic as a cultural strategy’. They regard gothic as a flexible concept that is not confined to just a single period or style. In 2010 they made a road-trip through the south of the United States in search of Southern Gothic, which resulted in an exhibition in the 1646 exhibition space in The Hague, among other things. Brazilian Gothic was the objective of their stay in Brazil, the country in which Oscar Niemeyer is a hero and modernism is almost sacred. Gouwenberg and Lindhout focus on an alternative hero: Zé do Caixao (loosely translated: Coffin Joe), the alter ego of filmmaker José Mojica Marins. He wears a black cape and top hat, hates superstition and religion and is entirely amoral. For Zé, Gouwenberg and Lindhout create a locus amoenus as a temporary habitat. Locus Amoenus was originally a literary term referring to an idyllic place devoid of rules.
Maaike Gouwenberg works as curator for Expodium, If I can’t Dance and W139, among others. She is founder of A.P.E., through which she organizes international performance projects. Joris Lindhout is a visual artist. His interest in the obscure is expressed in zines, murals, reading- and discussion groups and the Departement of Misdemeanor, Myth and Monstruosity (currently under development).
The Polish artist Anna Okrasko shows a number of video pieces, including her latest, a sixty-minute film that plays out against the background of the Utrecht housing estate Kanaleneiland, where she stayed at the invitation of art collective Expodium. The central aspect of her video work is the idea of a shared urban space and how the decisions that affect it are made, and the negotiations this involves. In a cinematic form, she aims to discuss issues relating to migration, housing and redevelopment. In her fictional documentaries she often incorporates various film genres and references to filmmakers, such as in Justus Story, a storyboard about the Van Effen complex in Rotterdam. This modernist national monument is currently being renovated and the residents have moved out. Okrasko transforms the block of houses into a surprisingly appropriate setting for a Robin Hood-like tale. Okrasko studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Urban utopias such as Brasilia, Kaliningrad and the Cité Modèle in Brussels have all been the subject of photographic research projects by Elian Somers. She searches for traces of the various ideologies that define the history of a city. For the past three years Somers has been working on a series about California City, a city in the Mojave Desert in the United States. In the nineteen fifties, sociologist Nathan Mendelsohn developed the plans for this utopian desert-city. Mendelsohn acquired a huge piece of land (330 square kilometres) and had designs drawn up for a grid of 52,000 lots, complete with roads, shops and facilities. The roads were built, but hardly any inhabitants arrived and in 1969 Mendelsohn sold his development company. California City is a work about utopia and dystopia, about the dream of the developer and the real estate bubble. In Somers’ photographs the landscape presents itself as both deserted and untouched: with traces of a past history, but also opportunities for a new story.
For Emily Whitebread, writing is an integral part of her artistic work, which also comprises video, audio, printed matter and performance. Her audio piece The Birth And Growth of Worlds takes us along on a journey through the cosmos. A man measures the distances between the planets in the Solar System. The greater the distance, the longer the pause before the next planet is named. The relationship between time and space is translated into silence and sound. The logic behind this does not solve riddle of its purpose. In 2012 Whitebread was RAIR artist-in-residence at artists’ initiative Duende in Rotterdam.
Bik Van Der Pol, Maaike Gouwenberg & Joris Lindhout, Karin Hueber, Anna Okrasko, Elian Somers, Emily Whitebread
6 September – 5 November 2012
Between the Map and the Territory is an exhibition inspired by a book. In 2010 the French author Michel Houellebecq wrote his bestselling novel The Map and the Territory. Its title is derived from the assertion made by Polish linguist Alfred Korzybski, ‘The map is not the territory’. The map-territory relationship describes the impossible relationship between a location and the representation of that location, such as the relationship between a city and its map. In his book, Houellebecq uses the fictional course of a successful artist’s life as the framework for a series of essay-like observations on the failure of the capitalist system and the decline of modernism. But also in the reality of the Twenty-teens, increasing numbers of writers and theorists are attempting to think beyond modernism. How can these attempts make a difference when The Map is Not the Territory and the relationship between words and reality is an impossible one?
Between the Map and the Territory manifests itself as a frame story for a number of artists who address our complex relationship to modernism, capitalism and citizenship in the contemporary city, in a productive, but also deliberately evasive way.
In 2011 Bik Van der Pol wrote the influential essay Work To Do for TENT, on the prospects for the arts in the big city. Has Rotterdam become a shrinking city with nothing to lose? For many years, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol have been prominent standard bearers for an artistic practice that reaches further than just the exhibition space. The meaning of their art becomes manifest in symposia, educational programmes, exhibition concepts and essays. In TENT, they place a monumental scoreboard with letter-cards. The board is animated live by assistants who constantly change the modular text elements to spell out a number of abstract idioms, quotes and maxims. The profusion of texts activates the observer into thinking and, thus, is also a plea for language as an important form of capital in today’s knowledge economy.
The Swiss artist Karin Hueber graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel in 2005 and has lived and worked alternately in Rotterdam, Berlin and Basel since 2006. Hueber’s work consists of installations of architectural elements that are apparently waiting to be used, as pieces of scenery for a stage production, as attributes for a performance. Elements are bent, folded, doubled, reversed or enlarged. Hueber's interest in the differences and similarities in the languages of architecture and sculpture results in precise compositions that create conflicting sensations, oscillating between the physical and mental experience of space.
For some time now, Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout have been conducting joint research into ‘gothic as a cultural strategy’. They regard gothic as a flexible concept that is not confined to just a single period or style. In 2010 they made a road-trip through the south of the United States in search of Southern Gothic, which resulted in an exhibition in the 1646 exhibition space in The Hague, among other things. Brazilian Gothic was the objective of their stay in Brazil, the country in which Oscar Niemeyer is a hero and modernism is almost sacred. Gouwenberg and Lindhout focus on an alternative hero: Zé do Caixao (loosely translated: Coffin Joe), the alter ego of filmmaker José Mojica Marins. He wears a black cape and top hat, hates superstition and religion and is entirely amoral. For Zé, Gouwenberg and Lindhout create a locus amoenus as a temporary habitat. Locus Amoenus was originally a literary term referring to an idyllic place devoid of rules.
Maaike Gouwenberg works as curator for Expodium, If I can’t Dance and W139, among others. She is founder of A.P.E., through which she organizes international performance projects. Joris Lindhout is a visual artist. His interest in the obscure is expressed in zines, murals, reading- and discussion groups and the Departement of Misdemeanor, Myth and Monstruosity (currently under development).
The Polish artist Anna Okrasko shows a number of video pieces, including her latest, a sixty-minute film that plays out against the background of the Utrecht housing estate Kanaleneiland, where she stayed at the invitation of art collective Expodium. The central aspect of her video work is the idea of a shared urban space and how the decisions that affect it are made, and the negotiations this involves. In a cinematic form, she aims to discuss issues relating to migration, housing and redevelopment. In her fictional documentaries she often incorporates various film genres and references to filmmakers, such as in Justus Story, a storyboard about the Van Effen complex in Rotterdam. This modernist national monument is currently being renovated and the residents have moved out. Okrasko transforms the block of houses into a surprisingly appropriate setting for a Robin Hood-like tale. Okrasko studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Urban utopias such as Brasilia, Kaliningrad and the Cité Modèle in Brussels have all been the subject of photographic research projects by Elian Somers. She searches for traces of the various ideologies that define the history of a city. For the past three years Somers has been working on a series about California City, a city in the Mojave Desert in the United States. In the nineteen fifties, sociologist Nathan Mendelsohn developed the plans for this utopian desert-city. Mendelsohn acquired a huge piece of land (330 square kilometres) and had designs drawn up for a grid of 52,000 lots, complete with roads, shops and facilities. The roads were built, but hardly any inhabitants arrived and in 1969 Mendelsohn sold his development company. California City is a work about utopia and dystopia, about the dream of the developer and the real estate bubble. In Somers’ photographs the landscape presents itself as both deserted and untouched: with traces of a past history, but also opportunities for a new story.
For Emily Whitebread, writing is an integral part of her artistic work, which also comprises video, audio, printed matter and performance. Her audio piece The Birth And Growth of Worlds takes us along on a journey through the cosmos. A man measures the distances between the planets in the Solar System. The greater the distance, the longer the pause before the next planet is named. The relationship between time and space is translated into silence and sound. The logic behind this does not solve riddle of its purpose. In 2012 Whitebread was RAIR artist-in-residence at artists’ initiative Duende in Rotterdam.