FLAT_land 09
Sunday December 27th 2-5 pm Potahof Delft (nl)

bij wijze van SPREKEN (artist talk) with presentations of Ans Kanen (nl) and Efrat Zehavi (isr), Izabela Oldak (pl), Joan Fabian (us) and Sabrina Harri (fi) about their work at FLAT_land.

_galerij_loop_09_____ (exhibition) with work from Alison Owen (us), Ans Kanen (nl), Babette Kleijn (nl), Barbara DePonti (it), Efrat Zehavi (isr), Elsbeth Muilwijk, FloPIdisk (nl), Inge Hoefnagel (nl), Izabela Oldak (pl), Janna Navis (nl), Jimena Kato Murakami (pe), Joan Fabian (us), John Mason (us), Juan Duque (co), Judith Jansen (nl), Kim Engelen, Odie Rynell Cash (us), Patricia Eustaquio (ph), Paul Santoleri (us), Peter Owen (us), Rolina Nell (nl), Richard Wearn (us), Ruben van Klaveren (nl), Sabrina Harri (fi) and Valantina Paroni (es).

Alison Owen
Each of my installations is created on site in direct response to the physical and emotional characteristics of the architecture. Working with simple materials – thread, masking tape, paper, dirt, and found objects – I construct installations that subtly alter the space. The resulting works draw upon my impulse to investigate and make sense of my surroundings. I consider my work to be drawing-based, but rather than working in two-dimensions with pencil on paper, I draw in three dimensions with materials both tangible (cut paper, thread, paint) and ethereal (light and shadow). Like drawing, the work results in a series of marks upon the space that reveal the process of intense observation, interpretation and recording. The installation at FLAT_land presents artifacts of domestic experience. I collected or created objects that have some relationship to decoration, such as picture frames, potted plants, and wallpaper, and yet are one step removed from their original manifestation. They are flipped, emptied out, or recreated out of unsuitable material. In this space, layers have been stripped away and new layers have been added, and a balance has been reached between my work and the existing space. www

Ans Kanen and Efrat Zehavi
Cooking Apes is an installation by Ans Kanen (choreographer\performer) and Efrat Zehavi (visual artist). Inspired by the “postmodern fable” of Lyotard, Ans & Efrat set on their experiment. They use an abandoned house in Delft as a laboratory for their ‘homemade evolution’ process, wherein body and material are in constant movement. With the help of a video camera, they record and document their process. The results are converted into a theatrical narrative and staged within the house. Sound by: Matthijs Jansen. “Waarop de Mens en zijn Verstand, of eigenlijk: waarop het Verstand en zijn Mens leken op het moment dat zij de planeet vlak voor haar vernietiging voorgoed verlieten, dat vertelde het verhaal niet.” –Jean-Francois Lyotard. www

Babette Kleijn
I want to experiment with my work by analysing it. What will happen when I give a figurative respond on my abstract pictures. The analyze will be a work on its own as a clear defragmented reflection of that what is shown on the picture. All together the atmosphere might become a playfull area in which abstract asthetics and heavyness will play a main role. www

Barbara DePonti and Iskra Sguera
“Speaking things”, the project, satisfies the desire to know a new city, which you have never seen before. The project wants to discover a new urban reality asking the collaboration of every citizen. The citizens will be actively involved in the project giving one of their belongings and then explaining its affective value and/or symbolic value. That all talks about the city of Delft, anyone with its own specific message. www

Elsbeth Muilwijk
Elsbeth Muilwijk creates drawings and objects. Topics and techniques are diverse. A recurring topic in her drawings, also in this exposition, is the autonomy of animals in nature versus their powerlessness in relation to humans in control. Her sensual tactile objects leave scope for various associations. In all her work she creates a world with an atmosphere of its own. www

Inge Hoefnagel
The start of the three dimensional work are the drawings and photographs made in the public space. In this case they are made during last years’ end in the city of Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. The drawings are based on walks through the city and observations of symbols, markers, signs and routes. There seems to be no choice; each location gives information and directions which way to go. A decision to go your own way appears unwise. From the drawings, I have searched for the basis; a form, a language of images which remains when all non-essentials have been stripped off. Sometimes the remaining object is returned to the same location, sometimes it is placed somewhere else, which leads to alienation. I wish a person, looking at the object, to observe the space in a different, more intensive, perhaps even experience it differently. The object and its surroundings cannot seen apart. The essence is not about the observer recognising the origin of the object, but giving his own interpretation. View this room with the door closed! www

Izabela Oldak
I am an artist, a painter living and working in Amsterdam. I was born in Rybnik in Poland in 1982. In 2007 I Graduated Academy of Fine Art in Poznan in Poland. Currently I study Fine Art in Dutch Art Institute in Enschede. Mostly I am creating abstract paintings and installations inspired by ornaments, fashion, design, psychedelic patterns, kaleidoscopic images, phantasmagoria, illusions, visions, fantasies, dreams and symbols. For me art is about research for truth, is a language to communicate and to express emotion and thoughts, to force people to think, to discuss and to expand horizons.
About the project “Reminiscence”; for the FLAT_land project I want to create a really intimate salt-painting titled: “Reminiscence”, consisting of organic beautiful patterns based on my dreams, symbols and daily life experience. I will place it in the building which will be demolished. By this action I want to direct the attention on the temporary side of life and human nature as a metaphor of living and dying, creation and destruction a universal cycle of life. www

Janna Navis
Outside autumnwind is a ghost. In the flat all doors are wide open, and plants and shrubs that took their refuge here, bow obediently for such force. White waves come very nearby and a sheep is enforcing himself to hide behind the wallpaper.....FLAT_land out in side is an installation of Diepzout Janna Navis in cooperation with Paul Caron. www

Juan Duque and Jimena Kato Murakami
A space... How to approach it, making it our own? When entering into 636 Poptahof for the first time brought about these questions: “How many times the doors have been opened and closed?” ,“Under which circumstances in their inhabitants’ daily lives?”, many people came to live in those spaces, many people left leaving traces, we came as strangers, we observed, we imagined, we also had stories to tell. We took the space as hostage, and worked there to render homage to those memories re-appropiation it’s a territorial struggle...
Working with materials found in the 636 flat – wooden doors, frames, curtains, carpets, newspapers, we constructed in situ installations that alter the space. www

Joan Fabian
Damp smell and sneaky evidence in flat 589. Tea towels with all those grinds – construction work-noise. Where is Mondrian in all this? He rests in Brooklyn! Another displaced artist far from home. His influence plays upon me as I see him in these rigid dwellings. Oh he loved nature! Squares and grids, a need for order. No round houses. Residents must evacuate. Blue/white ghosts float around. Old Delftware obsessively collected by some old lady – a human compulsion. Quest for beauty in a chaotic world? Poptahof squares must fall down to rise up once again. I go home to sleep. www

John Mason
Poptahof is in a state of transition. Something is destroyed so that something new is created, morphing from one thing to another. What was once to the left has moved to the right and vice versa. Nothing remains static; the universe is on the move. A person may think that they see clearly from one angle, but then if they move to another angle it can look very different. Micro-Phobic will integrate all of this into it’s processing of sound. www

Judith Jansen
Going all the way down to your inner core and make work from that point is the essence of my work. It is an outward manifestation of your inner, being as close to my sub consciousness as possible. Concepts such as ‘honesty’ and purity’ mean a lot to me. I’m making a picture of an identity; whoever it might be. It’s about dealing with the struggles between; soft-hard, attraction-subtraction, beauty-ugliness. All these tensions are to be found in ones identity; in body and behaviour. I’m trying to express contradictions in the body and a certain kind of sexuality. The contradictions become visible in the use of materials, such as: Metal-wool, Lycra-latex. To me my drawings are the same, but sometimes a little more save. They´re like small pages of your diary picked up from the floor to be seen by anyone. At FLAT_land I am showing some of my drawings, I believe they integrate very well with their environment. I’m trying to work more or less site-specific by also making installations. The old apartments have just been abandoned by its inhabitants. There are reminders of the people who used to live her: On the walls you still see the colours and scratches. I want to create an apartment left by itself; starting to create a life on its own. Anything can happen. www

Kim Engelen
‘TIME TO GO’ is a video by Kim Engelen. Actor: Georges Devdariani, Costumes: Wendy Rombouts. Tagline: Sensitive man demolishes his apartment with a sledge-hammer. Description: We see a man sitting on the floor. The musician sits with her cello on a chair. The room is empty except for a sledge hammer and a pot of paint. The man walks to the musician and kisses her on her head. We hear humming, beating, and picking sounds on the cello. The man writes on the wall with black paint: ‘Time to go’. His slow movements from before transform in staccato movements and become uncontrolled. The woman offers the man the hammer. And he demolishes his home and the life he once knew. www (photo André Smits)

Maarten Punselie & Audiocompost
Urban Shamanism. Installation, drawing, soundscape. Urban shamanism represents one’s need to stay in tune with the universe in an urban environment. www

Patricia Eustaquio
My works weave objects into a narrative and rely on the spaces in between what is actually there. The objects serve as clues, to complete the puzzles in our heads while our mind-cogs grind into the social, archaeological and art-historical spheres that our lives encounter. The almost violent tearing down and reconstruction going on outside to me seem to beg for a different kind of renovation indoors, and my idea is to transform the studio into an unexpected space amid this ‘violence’: to allow the space to use up the material inside and play with the elements streaming in from the outside. For the last three months, I have been collecting discards as well as flea market finds and have been transforming these into an overgrown garden, or a petrified living space. www

Paul Santoleri
Ink drawing direct on the wall, I travel light, though my baggage is marked heavy- I draw from fragments, from sketches and photos, to make the drawing in the space… I’ll also show some small pieces and photos of street interventions. It’s inspired by the lichen in Finland, the graffiti & sculptures in France and Germany and being here in the Netherlands. I often have had a studio in a building soon to be demolished or renovated. There’s something fleeting and final about working in spaces like this, every morning I hear them clean out another apartment, filling another dumpster, Doom daily creeping ever closer. The buildings, I imagine, like most concrete structures will be sand on the beaches of tomorrow. www

Peter Owen
I make drawings and paintings that encompass personal experience, public spaces, and the collective memory and narrative of cities. For this residency, I am creating a series of drawings using as source material specific architectural elements of the surrounding neighborhood. The drawings indicate the simultaneous renewal and entropy that transforms cities over time. www

Richard Wearn
I am interested in the utopian mythologies that are revealed to us through urban rehabilitation and renewal. For the Flat_Land project I will use the interior space of the apartment as the subject - the content generated by the interaction of the architecture with the memory imprint of those that lived there.The work is also conditioned by a sense of obsolescence. By providing a limited vantage point and denying viewers a direct experience of the apartment, the space becomes historicized. Once contained, even the most intimate occurrence is rendered mute and suspended. Preventing entry into the space re-casts our gaze as voyeuristic, and an accounting of absences. www

Rolina Nell
I make site specific paintings/murals and work with acrylic paint on canvas. My paintings often express my curiosity concerning women’s roles within a social and cultural structure. My work captures and isolates images of ordinary woman and girls; so common that it is usually overseen. They almost get absorbed by there surrounding, but despite of this it seems they turn their back to you and do what ever they like. It is mysterious who they are; their identities are only given by clothing and decorations. In spite of the colorfull forms, funny garments and details the paintings also have a feeling of sadness. My interest in unravel the existence of ordinary things generally invokes a feeling of emptiness and a sad look on the past or unfulfilled desires. www

Ruben van Klaveren
“Symbols, in whatever form they may appear, are not usually isolated; they appear in clusters, giving rise to symbolic compositions which may be evolved in time (as in the case of story-telling), in space (works of art, emblems, graphic designs), or in both space and time (dreams, drama)” .E. Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols I am always fascinated by symbols, on a theoretical level as well as on a visual level, from different angles I approach this theme in my work. By association symbols will create a story, a bigger picture, symbols can be seen as fragments, reflections of the primordial, the Platonic ideal. I think communication through archaic symbols still has a lot of power, I consider them timeless, symbols express the eternal through the use of the temporal. www

Sabrina Harri
Sabrina Harri articulates her creative practice around core issues on our perception of reality and its representations. Not without a certain humour, she embodies this theme in fragile and modular installations, drawings, videos and actions that ably disrupt common sense. By diversion and game, Sabrina Harri discreetly moves objects, as well as social conventions, towards a form of disillusioned poetry. Her work, at first glance trivial, subtly questions the changing values and cultural taboos of contemporary Western society. - Yannick Franck. www

Valentina Paroni
Walk in a box. I’ve always preferred walking than running because it allows me to take the right time to think. This work is called “walk in a box” and it’s about walking as a creative action. Walking you can cover a distance, measuring the space with your own body as a tool, and you can make experience of the time you consume to do that. So a walk in someway is a collection of fragments of time and space of the reality and environment that surround you, it’s a way to discover it. A walk is also a democratic action because walking you share the public space with other people. Cities that are walkable are usually very lively and democratic cities. In this box you can find the photographic documentation of my randoming walk in Delft.