'My travels with Barry' was the final presentation of the Master Fine Art of the Rotterdam Piet Zwart InstituteThe exhibition was created in collaboration with artist Bernd Krauss and art critic Jan Verwoert, both tutors at the program. They gave this conclusion of two years of study the motto of a journey in company that you did not choose yourself.
Travel companions
Imagine that you have gotten lost on the road, ended up in a strange place and are stuck with a guy named Barry. He is also a quiet type. But once she gets going, it is hard to stop her. She will speak in an inscrutable way about the future, the past and the place she came from. She speaks in images, allusions and codes. Sometimes she gesticulates so intensely that her gestures seem to form a kind of ballet. Having a conversation with Barry becomes like performing a kind of choreography together.
After a while, there are moments when you feel like you understand what he means and get his jokes. Wasn't he joking? With Barry, it's hard to say, but there are a few things you have in common: you both love Hitchcock and would do anything to leave this place. So you go. You travel with Barry to magical and mysterious places. Sometimes you just go for coffee or a walk in the park. The exact nature of your travels is hard to describe. You could say that they feel a bit like two years of art school and an exhibition. (Jan Verwoert)
About the artists
Mirjana Boba Stojadinovic was born in Yugoslavia. Or Serbia. She was born in a country where the temporality of space is well understood. She investigated how the memory of the place we come from can influence our understanding of the space we are going to.
Gunndís Yr Finnbogadóttir used the exhibition space to look at a domestic space (her mother-in-law's kitchen) and a workspace (her studio) with new eyes. Both are places for specific forms of production.
Jacqueline Forzelius opened an office, where a service was provided as best as possible. Something with communication. What service exactly was provided remained unclear. Yet the visitor became a participant in some way.
Terje Øverås wrote a prose poem: a 'pataphysical journey mapped out with an Oulipian map.' He also created various possibilities for reading the text.
In the video work of Margo Onnes' a doppelganger of 1960s TV heroine Emma Peel wandered through a set. But the individual shots seemed to have been rearranged at random. Worlds folded together, time cycles and characters shifted.
Sjoerd Westbroek explored the paradox of drawing: once something is depicted, it disappears behind the opaque surface of the drawing. This cat-and-mouse game between experience and representation becomes even more pertinent when a drawing is projected. 'What form of presence', Westbroek wondered, 'remains when the image simply seems to hang in the light?'
Edward Clydesdale Thomson investigated how a spectacle is constructed in various locations, such as zoos, ornamental gardens or peep shows. What logic is used to direct the viewer's attention or to reward his expectations? In his analyses he used photography but also spoken descriptions.
In Inger Alfnes' photos, familiar objects or landscapes were given a dark charge. The blade of a saw protrudes from a remote frozen lake. The object seems to take on an almost human form. In her images, a dark spirit often seemed to lurk behind a mask of formal beauty.
With video and sound work Egle Budvytyte magical stories that could be true. She discovered that fish send out messages that humans can decipher. Their signals swim through the air on a previously undiscovered frequency.
May Bekan was fascinated by the history of the phenomenon of leisure. Where workers used to travel in search of the sun, we now bring spray tans and sunbeds into our homes. Her installation merged the space of the sunbed and the classic summer holiday in a seductive technological narrative.
Esther the Flame was interested in the question of how people can create something from the absolute minimum. How do we start from zero? What happens when the threshold of normality is exceeded? How does a crisis (a war or poverty, for example) become a normal state?
Explored in video, performance and sculpture Gerwin Luijendijk the various properties of the house, the studio, or 'nature'. The elements in his presentation referred to well-known modernist stylistic figures, but also to the familiar everyday world.
Esmé Valk was concerned with social choreography: the study of social and non-social behavior. Gradually Valk concluded that she herself, as an observer, could not stand outside the phenomenon she observed. She sought a methodology to do justice to this reality.