Category Archives: Micronation

Lecture: Fotoboekenmarathon!

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Zondag 21 december 2008, 11.00- 18.00
Fotografiemuseum, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam

Fotoboekenmarathon! Signeersessies, interviews, discussies
Op 21 december 2008 organiseren Huis Marseille. PhotoQ en Shashin een fotoboekenmarathon: een dag met interviews, discussies en signeersessies. Ruim twintig Nederlandse fotografen van wie de laatste tijd boeken zijn verschenen komen aan het woord en zullen verkochte boeken desgewenst voorzien van een opdracht of handtekening. De fotoboekendag onderstreept het toegenomen belang van fotoboeken en biedt de mogelijkheid voor de kerstdagen een bijzondere aanschaf te doen. Bovendien geeft het evenement kopers de gelegenheid tot direct contact met de fotografen.

Het programma:
11 – 12 uur: Hellen van Meene, Dana Lixenberg, Ilse Frech
12 – 13 uur: Paul Kooiker, Johannes Schwarz
13 – 14 uur: Koos Breukel, Ringel Goslinga, Geraldine Jeanjean
14 – 15 uur: Hans van der Meer, Marco van Duyvendijk, Jan Banning
15 – 16 uur: Bert Teunissen, Carla van de Puttelaar, Edwin Zwakman, Geert van Kesteren
16 – 17 uur: Maurice Scheltens, Cuny Janssen, Bart Julius Peters
17 – 18 uur: Delphine Bedel, Hans Rooseboom

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Show: Temporary Museum Amsterdam

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Urban Symbiosis of Contemporary Art, May 7-12, 2008

You are cordially invited for the (Con)Temporary Museum Amsterdam. This imaginary museum creates a parallel program to that of Art Amsterdam. The editions in 2006 and 2007 proved a success and again this year the floor plan of the Museum is the entire city. The halls are made up by prominent Amsterdam-based art institutes, like de Appel Arts Centre, Foam, Kunstvlaai A.P.I., SMART Project Space, Stedelijk Museum CS and W139. Art Amsterdam is where the pulse beats.

CASZUIDAS is part of the Temporary Museum Amsterdam – Street Strategy route art in public space. From May 7 – 12 CASZ is presenting a special program in collaboration with SMART PROJECT SPACE and IMPAKT Festival

Visitors are provided with a free passe-partout, a go-as-youplease ticket that gives access to all ‘halls’ of the (Con)Temporary Museum Amsterdam. Each individual institute has realized an extra programme by artists also represented by Art Amsterdam galleries of ephemeral installations, guided tours and video programmes. All exhibitions, lectures, presentations and meetings are presented within inspiring routes. From gallery-route to solo-route, from openings to cafés.

Works
Playtime, 2005
Aussicht, 2001
Extasy, 2001
Micronation (1) – Madurodam, 2007
Micronation (2) – Miniaturk,  2007
The Script, 2001

Virtueel Museum Zuidas – CASZUIDAS
Prinses Irenestraat 19, NL-1077 WT Amsterdam. t/f +31 (0)20 6448644

Show: Moving Images In Public Spaces

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Moving Images In Public Spaces / Artist in Focus, May – June 2008

Caszuidas, Amsterdam
Curated by Jan Schuijren

CASZ– Contemporary Art Screen Zuidas is a stage dedicated to providing moving images from the visual arts to the public domain of the newly developed urban setting of Zuidas. Located on the Zuidplein in Amsterdam, CASZ presents a high quality selection of visual arts, showing a large selection of video and film works on a 40 m2 LED screen. The accompanying soundtrack is available through mobile phone (free of charge) or – during special events and openings – through the screen’s own built-in sound system.

Moving Images in Public Space Eighteen hours a day from 6 a.m. to midnight, an international selection of film and video works from established and emerging artists from all over the world intermingles with the public life on Zuidplein, addressing a mixed crowd of managers and office workers, students and academics as well as other inhabitants and users of the Zuidas. In addition, the bars and restaurants located on the ground floor of the Zuidplein buildings offer the perfect setting for letting go of your everyday concerns and opening yourself up to the enriching images that will evoke new perceptions of the Zuidas surroundings.

Works
Playtime, 2005
Aussicht, 2001
Extasy, 2001
Micronation (1) – Madurodam, 2007
Micronation (2) – Miniaturk,  2007
The Script, 2001

Virtueel Museum Zuidas – CASZUIDAS
Prinses Irenestraat 19, NL-1077 WT Amsterdam. t/f +31 (0)20 6448644

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Lecture: 93 Hollandse Pracht

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4 Nov 2007 14.30, Architecturecafé
RAP Architectuurcentrum, Leiden

Tussenruimte?- Paul Gerretsen en Philippe Terrier-Hermann
Op zondag 4 november 2007 wordt om 14.30 uur een Architectuurcafé georganiseerd rond het thema van de lopende tentoonstelling ‘Tussenruimte?’. Ateliermeester Paul Gerretsen geeft een toelichting op de tentoonstelling en fotograaf Philippe Terrier-Hermann organiseert een debat naar aanleiding van zijn boek ’93 Hollandse Pracht’.

Deelnemers aan het gesprek zijn:
Wilfried Lentz, directeur SKOR
Rebecca Sakoun, beeldend kunstenaar
Delphine Bedel, beeldend kunstenaar
Paul Gerretsen, Atelier Zuidvleugel

Steden uit het zuidelijk gedeelte van de Randstad zijn gedurende de afgelopen eeuwen steeds meer naar elkaar toe gegroeid, waardoor het begrip Randstad steeds meer een realiteit lijkt te worden, of toch niet?

Deze vraag is onderwerp van de tentoonstelling ‘Tussenruimte?‘ die het RAP in nauwe samenwerking met het Bureau Zuidvleugel heeft georganiseerd. Herinrichting van de Zuidvleugel, het zuidelijk deel van de Randstad, was onderwerp van onderzoek voor het bureau. Dit onderzoek is per 1 november aanstaande voltooid. Paul Gerretsen, ateliermeester van Atelier Zuidvleugel, doet verslag.

In datzelfde kader kregen kunstenaars opdracht om geïnspireerd door het Hollandse landschap een tentoonstelling in te richten in het Scheltemacomplex. Een van de kunstenaars, de franse fotograaf Philippe Terrier-Hermann zal zondagmiddag te gast zijn. Hij interviewde gebruikers van de Zuidvleugel en fotografeerde hun favoriete plek. In zijn boek 93 Hollandse Pracht doet hij hiervan verslag. Enkelen van de geïnterviewden zullen aanwezig zijn en deelnemen aan een rondetafelgesprek met de fotograaf en de ateliermeester over het Hollandse landschap en de verschillende visies die hierover bestaan.

RAP Architectuurcentrum
Nieuwstraat 33, NL-2312 KA Leiden. T +31 71 5137525
RAP Architectuurcentrum

Hollandse Pracht

Photography: Micronation – Notes on Tourism

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Exhibition 03 March – 26 Mei 2007
Het Torentje, Almelo
Artist Talk 17.00, Leescafé de Meridiaan

Tourism and leisure play a large role in our personal ways of life and imagination today. The great impact of tourism on world industry is a phenomenon that reflects shifting cultural, economic, social, and historical realities. In tourism, visual representation – the production of meaning through images – takes center stage.

From amusement parks and monuments, to camping and beach resorts, Delphine Bedel engages in her work with different layers of representation, including architecture of leisure and cultural artifacts. For her exhibition in Het Torentje, she presents her new project Micronation, Notes on Tourism.

For this project, Bedel visited two popular miniature parks, Miniaturk in Istanbul and Madurodam in The Hague. Since the 1930’s, public miniature parks have been constructed all over the world, as children’s attractions (Dos Pequenitos, 1940, Portugal), charity and war memorials (Madurodam, 1952, the Netherlands), and tourist and commercial sites (Mini-Europe, 1989, Brussels); their meanings and identities eventually change over time.

These theme parks contain miniature monuments constructed by anonymous historians and skilled craftsmen. A choice of historical buildings, city, or country is reproduced as a small-scale, constructed view of the past fraught with omissions and blind spots, defining a secure world of “sameness”, a commodification of space, meanings and identity. What is the relationship between images and truth? Between experience and spectatorship? Between architecture and identity?

Madurodam is a model city in which famous buildings, monuments, an airport and harbors of the Netherlands are reproduced in miniatures. With similar remarkable details and a scale of 1 to 25, the recent Miniaturk built in Istanbul presents models reflecting Turkey’s cultural heritage from antiquity to nowadays, from Hagia Sophia, to Artemis Temple, to the Bosphorus Bridge.

Like the now-popular online game Micronation, in which individuals create their own models of imagined countries or nations, these parks are often personal or private initiatives. An idealized and fragmented interpretation of national and cultural heritage assumes the appearance of reality, and even directly relates to it: in the successful online game Second Life, Sweden recently opened an embassy, and Madurodam has an elected mayor. Miniature parks and online games are becoming part of our collective imaginary.

In her installation, Bedel’s tourist snapshots, by focusing only on architectural details of the scale-models, engage the viewer’s perception and sense of experience. Her photographs address the constructed cultural, anthropological, and political aspects of reality, and the limits of representation. Her project is also anchored in the history of Het Torentje – the tower, part of the former Nijverdale Ten Cate textile factory, is a memory of the industrial architecture of the city that wasn’t preserved. This textile industry also established strong bonds with Turkey in the past, and Almelo has therefore a twin city in West Anatolia. Far and near, past and present, constructed space and reality unfold their continuous and complex relation in Bedel’s work.

Bedel’s transient and straightforward images enhance the realism and craft of the miniature monuments. The architectures are removed further from their geographical context(s) in her photographs, a delocalization of meaning engaging the viewer and the artist in a peculiar reality check.

Like children in a miniature park, perception and imagination are at play; multiple perspectives and polyvocality are requested to make sense of our shifting and fragmentary representations of the world. “The moment you have doubts, everything is possible” (Jean Rouch).

Thanks to the Gemeentearchief Almelo.

Het Torentje, Almelo
Opening Saturday 3 March17.00-20.00
Egbert Gorterstraat (150m from the station)
www.hettorentje.nl