One benefit of the Museum Year Card not easily mentioned is the uninhibited free access to clean and comfortable restrooms in the centre of major cities. 'Fifty-plus urinals with MJK' an experienced museum porter called this group of visitors, who, by the way, are very welcome: every pull with the scanning gun means extra cash. Big advantage: you get to see something extra. A second or...
The 57th Venice Biennale brings the world together and the art world to Venice. This year, the biennial art event is bigger than ever. Here you will find out what is 'trending' in contemporary art. Everyone thinks something of this event and we live in a time when everything and everyone is held up to the yardstick: 'Have you been there?....
Every five years, the art world is turned upside down. Then it is time for the fourteenth Documenta. At that time, the German city of Kassel turns into a veritable Mecca for art connoisseurs and art lovers, snobs and connoisseurs. And, of course, tourists looking for that other Efteling. This year's Documenta has a sizeable Dutch contribution. But there is more: for the...
Displaced paintings by Armando. Artists fleeing the city. A tinpot that brought financial disaster and summer festivals that attract tens of thousands of visitors every year. And you thought Amersfoort was boring? A footnote along the A1 motorway? Forget it. Let me tell you about this city struggling with its cultural identity. A story in eighteen impressions. Guilty landscape In his youth...
Do it. Make it. Don't care about others. Don't think about the consequences. Then sit on the blisters for a while, they will heal again. Starving for a while for art is not bad either. So choose your own path and enjoy every step. Above all: live in the here and now, all the time. History becomes...
On Piet Mondrian's birthday, 7 March, the municipality of The Hague offered its residents a colossal decorated cake. It is part of a very active campaign around 100 years of De Stijl. While the Gemeentemuseum is presenting three substantive Stijl exhibitions this year, The Hague is going all out with Stijl imitations and plastered shop windows. A contradiction? Less than it seems, because this citydressing...
While Jan Martens' latest work, The Common People (2016), was at Amsterdam's Stadschouwburg last weekend, Utrecht's Theater Kikker is showing two older hits this week: Sweat Baby Sweat (2011) and The dog days are over (2014). Sweat and Dogdays are blockbusters and have already toured the world. At Kikker, they can now be seen as part of a...
Why did I find the mythical stories about being an artist more interesting than the artworks I saw? I wondered this after visiting the exhibition GOED GEMAAKT (ode to the making process) at the Amersfoort art gallery KAdE. Only a single work of art touched me, while the stories about Daedelus, Pygmalion and the daughter of Butades fascinated me immensely....
The Amsterdam version of the Moving Futures festival 2017 has begun. For four days, young dance makers show all sides of their creativity. I experienced a cosmic journey with (SHIFT), was cheered by Third Culture Kid by Joseph Simons and saw the excitement slumped a little by a piano at the end of Your Mother at my Door by Timothy and...
Each month, in the (Un)heard series, I present extraordinary sound that does not go unnoticed and unsung. In this December edition: Brume, Cinema Perdu, Emanuele de Raymondi, Mark Fell, Zeno van den Broek and James O'Callaghan. Like a vise around the neck Brume - Mother Blast (LP, Grautag) Nicolas Moulin's Grautag label guarantees dystopian soundscapes. Those landscapes the label presents...
Amsterdam's oldest and perhaps most beautiful building combines quite a few functions. Although tourists are dominant these days, believers still celebrate the love of God there every week. And even though the former Nicolaaskerk no longer provides space for fishermen to mend their nets, organ concerts are still given there, since the fourteenth century. Handing out bread is not...
On a cold rainy afternoon, I cycle to the Brakke Grond to ask Bert Hana about his motivations, as befits a beer. First, I visit the IDFA DocLab, which features his VR installation 'I Am Not Home Video', which we have talked about before. Bert Hana is perhaps every art critic's dream, as...
IDFA's tenth DocLab shows the state of the art in interactive documentaries, virtual reality and other media art. Juggle the artist's body or experience what it is like to be (colour) blind.
Zvizdal, the documentary theatre portrait of Pétro and Nadia filmed by Berlin between 2011 and 2016, is not only in Paris, Ghent and Athens. This moving story can also be seen in the Netherlands until 11 November 2016. Near the place where an atomic experiment failed in 1986, Berlin and Zvizdal tell a moving story about an old peasant couple. They remained as...
It took a while, but soon Jan Wolff (1941-2012), founder of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, will get his well-deserved tribute. On Monday 22 August - his dying day - the concert hall will conclude its tenth anniversary celebrations with the unveiling of the interactive sound installation Huil van de Wolff. It was designed by composer Martijn Padding and realised by Johan...
How to avoid choice stress at the Edinburgh Fringe bursting at the seams on all sides? We conduct an experiment: a day on the flow of flyers.
I experienced by far one of the most impressive theatre experiences of my life on Friday 5 August 2016. I was a guest at 'Zvizdal - Chernobyl so far, so close' by the Flemish company Berlin, in co-production with Het Zuidelijk Toneel. I saw this 'documentary installation' in an empty factory hall in Den Bosch, where the work is a beautiful resting point in...
There I am. Next to Holland Festival director Ruth Mackenzie, on a grave, as part of the installation Gardens Speak on the stage of the main hall of Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam. There is nothing to see, little to hear. Tone lights suggest a rising sun after a few minutes. I get up together with the ten other visitors. Quite a shame, because I was actually quite comfortable lying there.
The programme booklet sounded promising:
There are countries in the world, where the boundaries between art disciplines are not as sharply drawn as they are here. The Holland Festival, under the new leadership of Ruth MacKenzie, is catching us up. She is bringing events here where the boundaries between visual art, performance, video, film and performing arts can no longer be drawn. Events that generate meaning in ways that are quite new to us, such as The Encounter, last week, and Gardens Speak, later this week.
No actor to be seen in the auditorium of Theatre de Veste in Delft. Just a house with walls and roof of transparent cloth. It holds thirty people. On the walls of the hall around it, projected images pass by at whirling speed. This is fascinating: usually, when you are in a house, the walls close you off from the surroundings, but this time they actually give a view of a world as big and beautiful as you never experience in ordinary life.
Brazil's Christiane Jatahy was already with the play last year What If they went to Moscow at the Holland Festival. She came, saw and conquered. This year, she comes with the final part in the trilogy of stage adaptations, The Walking Forest. The title refers to the three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, who foretell his rise and fall. The play was the starting point for a performance with four video screens, a bar, an actress, a dead fish and, oh yes, an audience.
Choreographer Jan Martens' new performance, The Common People, is on show in Utrecht this weekend during Spring. Dozens of volunteer performers have a blind date on the stage of the Stadsschouwburg's main auditorium. The audience can walk in and out between performances, drink a beer for the duration of one or more duets or browse on the back stage and...
'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.
The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.
Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was
An exhibition that puts our view of migration and migrants at the centre, critical of our migration policy but does not fall into easy pamphleteering, that is "Voices outside the echo chamber". On Friday 29 April, the exhibition "Voices outside the echo chamber"-an exhibition by Framer Framed, the Amsterdam-based organisation that has been questioning and commenting on the visual language in our arts for years-opened at the Tolhuistuin. After all,...
With Free Fall, Jiří Kylián shows his photographic works for the first time. He talks enthusiastically about his discoveries, his inspiration, and Sabine. The house in The Hague where Jiří Kylián has lived for more than 30 years radiates joy of life. Warm colour tones, fragrant flowers, classicist furnishings yet cosy. Unmistakably the 'touch of a woman.' That woman is Sabine Kupferberg, the life partner and...
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