Kunsthuis SYB

Sunday, Nov. 13 through Sunday, Dec. 4, 2022
open Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

with Benjamin Francis, Olivia D’Cruz, Peter Scherrebeck Hansen, Sarjon Azouz, Vita Soul Wilmering

CARRIERS

by Titus Nouwens, curator

The 9^th edition of the Sybren Hellinga prize brings together five artists from vastly different contexts­; they come from Denmark, Goa, The Netherlands, Syria­ and have graduated in recent years from art schools in Amsterdam and Arnhem, Ghent and Groningen. The works they present at Kunsthuis SYB depart from personal and familial histories and comprise various media including moving image, ceramics and textile. Autobiography and fiction are intertwined in five multi-media installations conveying distinct performative elements; of watching and being watched, character formation and narration, scores and props, movement and decay.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). In this essay, published in 1984, Le Guin argues that the source of human evolution is not the invention of the weapon, but that of the container, the carrier bag. She writes: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again­–if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.”

The notion of the carrier is a recurring element in the exhibition. With Sarjon Azouz there is the construction of a space where bodies can be contained and transported to a different reality; Vita Soul Wilmering and Peter Scherrebeck Hansen bring forward the body as a repository of memories, carrying feelings from one place to another; and with Olivia d’Cruz and Benjamin Francis the carrying of tangible materials opens up to various exploitative and controlling tendencies of our everyday world. Participating in a prize the nominees demonstrate an incentive to develop a career as an artist. Carrier and career are two words that on the one hand refer to content and on the other hand to movement. Etymologically the word career shares its origin with carrier, namely they both derive from carrus, Latin for wheeled vehicle. A thriving career as an artist is often suggested as synonymous to being on the road. At the same time, many artists deal with movement and migration as a condition of their practice. In the contributions to this exhibition such questions around containing versus moving take shape.

Sarjon Azouz‘ installation, entitled Bimbo Zygote Project, is a literal carrier or capsule of sorts. It is a bed with pillows that contain screens showing a video work where another world, an alternative view on being human, unfolds. In this beyond-human world presented by Azouz, genetically engineered sex workers with chronic alter egos (the Bimbos) trade in testosterone on the grey market. A vlog-style video, combining tiktok clips of one of the Bimbos talking about her daily life as a sex worker, is interspersed with feverish spinning shots of multiple Bimbo figures posing and running through a desolate space, while a voiceover recites a manifesto about these creatures. This recent graduation work is exemplary of Azouz’ artistic practice, in which vanity, alienation and identity politics are important themes. Seductive and conveying a feeling that lies somewhere between existential crisis and hilarious camp, the universe created by Azouz is one of many alter-egos—extensions of the self. Through these characters the artist seeks to reclaim the narrative imposed upon them.

Alienation–and trying to find a position in the world–is an important theme in Vita Soul Wilmering‘s practice. The work Spiegl is told from the perspective of its protagonist Yitschak Spiegl, a Jewish man who fled communist Czechoslovakia in 1988. In the 54-minute film that combines documentary style with staged moments and musical narration, you see Wilmering and Spiegl visit places in Eastern Europe where he resided as a refugee. Chance encounters on the street give you a sense of the social climate and conventional thinking that have been the painful undertones of his life story. Wilmering explores what she refers to as the ‘performative space provoked by the presence of the camera’, as a way to communicate intimately with the people she films. A close intergenerational friendship develops between artist and protagonist as you see them travel together, or decide how to play the next scene. Fiction touches on the hyper-real here.  The film integrates the making of the work into the work itself and provides a piercing image of history, grief and the desire for connection and refuge.

In the backspace of Kunsthuis SYB, the half-demolished, centuries-old original walls function as a carrier for the works of Scherrebeck Hansen, Francis and D’Cruz. Each bring something from an interior to an exterior, extracting tangible and intangible matter, in order to hold and enfold it. Benjamin Francis‘ installation consists of a tower made of aluminium and mirrors, in the middle of a basin filled with liquid soap and softener that is pumped up from the inside of the tower, to spill down again along the surfaces of the mirrors. The installation invites viewers to observe it from different positions in space. Looking at themselves in the mirror, they see their own image being ‘washed’ and ‘softened’. At the same time, due to the constant circulation, the soap will ‘rot’ during the exhibition run. In his practice Francis refers to authoritarian structures that underline modes of behaviour and what is seen as incorrect and as correct, clean and dirty, right and wrong. The work presented at SYB is indicative of this. Its title Guard Gates directly invokes the panopticon principle, whereby a guard can view all prisoners from a tower in the middle of the prison. Guard Gates is a powerful symbol of invisible authority that influences how we behave and move through life, with a never-ending sense of surveillance.

In her work, Olivia D’Cruz explores connections between people and between human existence and the natural world. How do we deal with the earth, with its raw materials and ecosystems? And how does this relate to a colonial past?  Fe203: A DREAM is part of a series of three works, each translating a position within a court case: the groundwater poisoned by mining as plaintiff; the farmer on whose land an iron ore mine has been built (the artist’s uncle) as defendant; and an activist who has retired as a prosecutor. In this third film, which is presented at SYB, the retired activist talks about the problems in her habitat in South Goa. Iron ore mining results in the drying up of water springs and the local government favours quick money over preserving ancient ecosystems. In a dream, the activist finds herself in the mining pit where she meets a younger generation in the form of three figures who break bad news. The result is a work about the dichotomy of wanting to pursue your ideals, while being part of, benefiting from, or being dependent on a system of exploitation. This series was originally conceived for Noorderlicht Gallery in Groningen, a region where a similar conflicting relationship exists between the extraction of raw material (gas in this case), profiting companies and inhabitants who experience the effects of it in their day-to-day life.

In her book Sensing Sound (2015), vocal scholar Nina Sun Eidsheim writes that the voice is constructed by both listener and speaker and that we are all connected in and through sound. Sun Eidsheim conceives the sonic being as a multi-sensory phenomenon, consisting of tactile, spatial, physical and vibrational sensations. Trained as a classical cellist, Peter Scherrebeck Hansen makes performances in which voice and body are deployed ‘in-between the contours of things’. Their installation in SYB entitled SOUVENIR [suv(ə)niʀ] is an example of how sound, especially voice, can feel penetrating and tangible. With this work, the artist explores the resonance of sound from body to body, and from a large vase to the space around it (also referred to by the artist as para-space).  How do memories and traumas resonate from body to body? Two figures sing in each other’s mouths a song about seeking refuge. The video can be seen and heard from the bottom of a large vase (originally constructed by a ceramist during the performance of a stage version of the work). SOUVENIR [suv(ə)niʀ] is accompanied by photographs of Scherrebeck Hansen’s mother–a nurse with clairvoyant capacities–from a time when she went into hiding from an ex-partner, and photos of a performative intervention staged by the artist at the same place forty years later.

The diverse artistic practices brought together in Carriers express the concerns of this generation of artists in an exhibition that can hopefully be a carrier for their careers into the future.

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Titus Nouwens is a curator and organiser based in Amsterdam and Athens. Central to his work are social relations, personal histories and a strong interest in the conditions, structures and formats of artmaking and viewing. He has curated and produced projects for ROZENSTRAAT, De Appel and FLAM in Amsterdam, Haus N in Athens and Manifesta Biennial in Prishtina. In 2020 Nouwens obtained an MA Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art in London and since 2022 he is on the advisory board of nomadic art platform Het Resort in Groningen.

The exhibition is on view from Sunday Nov. 13 through Sunday, Dec. 4, 2022, and is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 pm.

Biographies

Benjamin Francis graduated from the Fine Arts programme at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem in 2020. Within his work he reflect on his lived experience of continuously being corrected for spelling mistakes, due to his dyslexia. These dissonances or errors are carefully corrected in our current-day society, as anything outside the norm is deemed unproductive and therefore excluded. By exposing the hidden dynamics of the power relations that structure and regulate the way we were taught to distinguish right from wrong, he questions how those systems came into existence and who holds the position to dictate those binary oppositions. Benjamin has recenlty shown at Hotel Maria Kapel, Het HEM, P/////AKT, Singular Art, and Mutter, among others.

Olivia D’Cruz (1996) is a Groningen based artist and filmmaker from Goa, India. She graduated in illustration and animation at Academy Minerva in 2020. Inspired by ecofeminism and the environmental humanities, her work focuses on gathering stories from the more-than-human world. She is interested in the structures that make encounters between landscapes, humans and other animals possible or impossible. In 2020 she was awarded the Academy Minerva Research Prize for her graduation film. In 2022 D’Cruz exhibited her long-term project about resource extraction at Noorderlicht in Groningen. She regularly develops art workshops for children and places great importance on collaboration and intergenerational relationships within her artistic practice.

Peter Scherrebeck Hansen graduated from SNDO, School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam University of the Arts in 2022. Peter is a cellist, video artist and choreographer, who works from a queer feminist perspective. In their choreographic work Peter researches and carves out what they name “the paraspace” — a space for liminal beings of different times. Peter creates choreographic tableaux which dialogue between video, ceramics, voice and the praxis of calling upon and embodying female figures. With a starting point from the physical body and somatic practices, Peter is aiming to create choreographic containers for private and collective memories and their residues. A praxis where the body becomes a choreographic container itself.

Sarjon Azouz is a multidisciplinary artist, working with vanity as a research space in identity politics. They graduated in 2022 from BEAR, ArtEZ Arnhem. Across durational mediums of performance, writing and audio-visual works, Sarjon’s practice revolves around finding ways to conduct spaces of dialogue between their many alter egos. These characters find agency through sound, words, and props which are made and used with an accelerationist approach as a research method, resulting with provisional compositions for various space and media interventions. Sarjon is currently artist in residence at Museum Arnhem, selected artist and curator for Biennale Gelderland 2022-2023 and since 2019 programmer for the queer intervention group Queeructation in Arnhem.

Vita Soul Wilmering (1996) lives and works in The Hague, where she is part of the artist collective Helicopter. Wilmering studied Audiovisual Arts and took courses at the conservatory and drama department at KASK in Ghent. Starting her projects from a basis in documentary film, Wilmering works with video, installation art, performance and music. She considers the performative space which a camera evokes an instrument to start friendships and to communicate on an intimate level with the people she works with. Her films have been selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Visions du Reél (CH) and DocLisboa (PT). She was artist in residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and KAMEN Artist Residency in Bosnia and Herzegovina.