In Dialogue: The Autonomous Art Practice and The Dream

Wanneer: 25 april 2025 - 1 july 2025

Four young, recently graduated artists show their work in a dialogue with historical (art) objects. Is autonomous artistry still possible in today’s barren cultural world?

Downloads The Autonomous Art Practice and The Dream

Handout – EN
Overview of artworks Room 1, 2 and 3 (objects from the Collection Center of the Netherlands – RCE)

Handout EN
Overview works of art Room 1, 2 and 3 (objects of CollectieCentrum Nederland – RCE)

Public program

For visitors with visual impairments:
Descriptive list of the objects in the exhibition

For visually impaired visitors:
Descriptive list of the objects in the exhibition.

Press:
metropolism

About the exhibition

Imagine an 1825 Prix de Rome winner in conversation with a contemporary painter at the Rijksakademie, or an art school student having a feedback session with an eighteenth-century console clock-maker. Despite the fact that, according to Western scholarship, we cannot possibly engage with deceased artists and artisans, these are thought-provoking performances to reflect on from a transhistorical perspective.

Cacophony

The CollectionCentrum Netherlands (CCNL), also known as the treasury of the Netherlands, houses about half a million objects, and with a little imagination, the exhibition The Autonomous Art Practice & The Dream brings these objects to life.

What if the works stored interpret the voices of their creators, and that these voices form a cacophony of conversations, discussions and dialogues for all eternity?

What then, for example, is their opinion on the financial impoverishment of our arts and culture sector, instigated by Rick van der Ploeg in 1999. And what advice do they give contemporary artists on how to deal with the 2024 clearcut, and the toppling of presentation spaces under the saw line?

Dialogue

In this barren art landscape, CBK Zuidoost presents the transgenerational exhibition The Autonomous Art Practice & The Dream, a group exhibition featuring artists Yrene van Amstel, Elle van Baaren, Sandy van den Brink and Joanne Igbuwe. Four young creators showing autonomous work and engaging in conversation among heritage objects. How do they deal with current issues and in what ways does this shape their practice? Do they see sufficient appreciation for their future heritage, the kind of heritage that, according to modern and contemporary standards, is not limited to the material?

To stimulate dialogue and simulate a dream world, curator Claudio Ritfeld, in collaboration with the National Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE), arranged the exhibition as an immersive installation. A space full of absurdism, and a place where choices are based as little as possible on logic and reason.

Also listen to the podcast interviewing the participating artists. In Dialogue: season 1 – CBK Zuidoost

Click on the link for the public program: Public Program

Learn more about the artists and their work

Yrene van Amstel

#29 Spikri (ceramics with mirror glaze), #11 (rug on wall), #12 Opo-ai (glasses), #2 (necklace), #32 Kwinsi (hanging object orange), #30 Lontu (hanging object white), #31 (object on floor)

Yrene van Amstel’s work is an ongoing search for identity and connection to Surinamese culture, with the mat beater symbolizing both entanglement and connection. This research continues to evolve and takes on a new form in The Autonomous Art Practice & The Dream. In it, she weaves together existing work into a new whole, appropriate to the current phase of her research. With excellent care for detail and aesthetics, she combines various materials such as textiles, ceramics and metal executed in different techniques.

Yrene van Amstel (2000) works from a broad interest and fascination with stories and experiences that surround her. She is attracted to people and perspectives that fall just outside the flow and explores in her work how she relates to them. Identity and community are important recurring themes in her work.

@yr1eva

Elle van Baaren

Untitled
This work is inspired by the unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere that arises when you stop for a moment to detach from the meanings attached to the things that surround you. It delves deep into the tension between beauty and discomfort, exploring the suddenly emerging need to get away from it all.

Headstones
There is something absurd about the need to claim space after death and to preserve what is already gone. A headstone should be the end, but it exists to keep something alive; a paradox carved in stone.

“Death only shows the ultimate absurdity of life.” – A.J. Soprano

CATDOG
The double-sided dildo made me think about the human body, which is so abstracted and distorted until it becomes a double-sided dildo. I connected this research to abstract, minimalist images, in which artists try to arrive at a primitive form or symbol by removing all unnecessary elements. Taking away more and more layers until you get to the foundation of a particular feeling.

Elle van Baaren (2000) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam, working in sculpture, installation, performance, drawing and painting. She graduated from the ceramics department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2023 and works from her studio in Amsterdam Noord.

Her practice revolves around collecting objet trouvé and found footage, transforming disorder into something seductive: organized chaos. She draws inspiration from the use of pop culture and mass media aesthetics to shape personal, repressed or perverse feelings. In addition, she explores how habitual communication functions as visual language and how something intimate can be presented as something familiar and collective.

@ellevanbaaren

⃝Sandy van den Brink

Riki Piki Tiki Ki Riki Ki Tiki
A handmade domino set with illustrations referencing the home culture of the ABC Islands.

Fruits Of Preservation
Fruits Of Preservation embodies the cultural heritage of the kunukeros, local farmers in the ABC Islands who live and farm the land largely according to indigenous customs. The collection aims to destigmatize the rurality of the kunuku and also serve as an alternative, virtual archive for its ideologies, methodologies and the richness of its aesthetic.

Poesia Doloroso
This work displays “artifacts” of memories of places in the Caribbean that have been lost and largely undocumented. It is a physical manifestation of the complex emotion of nostalgia, born of a desire for tangibility and a way to cope with grief. The memories in question were collected using a mental exercise Sandy developed: “immersive retrospective meditation” in which participants are led to a vivid mental experience of a place of their choice.

Father and Daughter Fishing By The North Sea
This series is a documentation of the artist and her father on a fishing trip by the North Sea. The portraits reveal the emotional intimacy that father figures often express through sharing knowledge and skills, while exploring the dynamics of gender roles in the form of inherited identity.

Sandy van den Brink (b. 1997) is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam. In her work she uses a unique approach to making and research, often merging different media in each specific process.

Rooted in curiosity, fascination and catharsis, Sandy’s work stems from a calling to narrate Caribbean experiences through a lens that does not focus so much on pain, hardship and victimization. Instead, she romanticizes scenes from everyday life; diving deep into childhood memories, stories of love and the bond between man and nature that underpins her culture and the art through which she contributes to it.

@sandysandisande

🅇 Joanne Igbuwe

SufferS
Paper and passepartout board.

Silly Days – Man In the Garden
Wax, resin, silver leaf, metal and various flowers.

Joanne Igbuwe (born 1996) is a visual artist, teacher and creative entrepreneur from Amsterdam, with a Nigerian family history. Her work finds its inspiration in various sources and archives, and expresses itself mainly in photography, drawing or painting or in a combination. She also often uses texts. Recently she has started spatial research and uses 3D media such as jewelry and ceramics. Joanne explores themes of culture, identity and color, which she presents both poetically and socially.

@janneigbuwe

COLOFON

Curator: Claudio Ritfeld

Image and design: Alexander Dahms

Sound Design: Lewis Knight

Final editing: Nicole Santé

Media Partner: The Gang Is Beautiful

With special thanks to: Diener Hermanos Mexico, Trudy Drescher, Desiré de Fiennes, Otto Heuvelink, Pieter Cornelis de Moor, Daan Padmos, Franciscus Hubertus Peeters, Carla van Riet, Jan Siebers, Wieki Somers, Jan C. Verschoor, Harald Vlugt

This exhibition has been generously supported by:

Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts

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