The artists in Dark Matters explore the misty corners of a dark universe. They show a world that seems neither utopia nor dystopia, a place whose nature does not immediately reveal itself. What does this world tell us? Meaning is not given. However, space is created for reflection on ourselves and our own time. Universal themes such as growth and destruction, good and evil, were depicted in monumental drawings, sculptures and installations.
Sandro Setola sketches a grim world in monumental charcoal drawings, video animations and installations. Universal themes such as isolation, destruction, growth and decay often recur in his work. In his installation 'Retreat (I know I can't win)', consisting of a projection of a tunnel system of an underground city and a model, gloomy-looking architecture becomes the bearer of ideas about the mental world.
Dario D'Aronco created a minimalist sound installation inspired by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, who wanted to compose purist music for a new world just after the Second World War. D'Aronco seeks the starting point where the ear of the spectator generates meaning from the purest possible sound and the most absent possible image.
's photos Fiona Weir reveal their subject only gradually. In her photographs of natural surroundings or abandoned places, the human presence is visible only in a shadow or a trail in the grass, where culture and nature mingle. The melancholic images seem to express an existential loneliness.
Silvia B. presented photographs and sculptures in which the circus functions as a world in which beauty and disgust, emotion and horror compete for precedence. In the world of the circus, everything is possible and reality is violated. What is good can become bad and vice versa. The photographs are reminiscent of sets from a film noir, with a melancholic, somber, alienating tone.
In Renie SpoelstraIn her monumental charcoal drawing, branches of a tree blow up to offer a view of the darkness of a deep forest. She is not concerned with capturing a specific location, but with reducing a concrete image to a universal concept. She seeks the moment when nothing happens but the threat of the moment before or after is already palpable.
Interest in the sublime brought Marielle Buitendijk to three-dimensional work. Mathematical graphs form the basis of her wall reliefs, which, although created according to algorithmic principles, appear as chaotic proliferations.
The sound installation 'Rumoer' by Dirk van Lieshout consisted of manhole covers with radio plays and soundscapes of revolts and bloody uprisings in the Amsterdam district of Kattenburg. A public version of the work was simultaneously unveiled on the Kattenburgseplein. In his installations in public space, Van Lieshout takes the (unwritten) rules of a place as a starting point.
Jeroen Kuster creates self-invented creatures with disposable materials in a combination of fantasy and anatomical knowledge. The utopian organisms and mutated animals that result from his research have a self-evidence that forces the viewer to think about nature and its manipulation in the current era.
In an infectious formal language with a mixture of science fiction, futurism, kitsch and refined aesthetics, the sculpture spoke of Charl Land Joy on the possibility of emptying colour of its meaning and creating an apolitical image of humanity.
Marc Bijl examines the underlying power structures that characterize our contemporary mass culture. He uses familiar logos and imagery that are directly derived from youth and protest culture, and uses this visual language to question the power relations between the individual and society in an era that seems to have lost its naivety forever.
Related events
Thetination Outer Space was an event about the infinity of the universe, Afrofuturism, and inexplicable phenomena in the cosmos, with Charl Landvreugd, Marielle Buitendijk and science journalist/astronomer Govert Schilling.
The Darkness Within was an event about the unfathomable depths of the human mind, occult practices and the unreliability of memory, with Silvia B. and Sandro Setola.
Matters in the Dark – education
Renie Spoelstra, Jeroen Kuster, Marc Bijl and Silvia B. each developed a project for art academy students and high school students. They investigated the concepts, strategies and techniques of the artists and worked together on a new universe. A collaboration with the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, Royal Academy of Art The Hague, University of the Arts Utrecht and the high schools Schravenlant, Wolfert Pro and Calvijn Maarten Luther.