In Dialogue: The Autonomous Art Practice and The Dream
Wanneer: 25 april 2025 - 1 july 2025
Yrene van Amstel, Elle van Baaren, Sandy van den Brink, Joanne Igbuwe
Four young, recently graduated artists are showcasing their work in a dialogue with historical (art) objects. Is an autonomous art practice still visable in our current, barren cultural world?
Picture this: an 1825 Prix de Rome winner in conversation with a contemporary painter at the Rijksakademie, or an art student in a feedback session with an eighteenth-century console clockmaker. Despite the fact that, according to Western scholarship, we cannot possibly engage in conversation with deceased artists and craftspeople, these are tantalising performances to think about from a transhistorical perspective.
Cacophony
The Cultuurcentrum Nederland (CCNL), also known as the Treasury of the Netherlands, stores around half a million objects, and with a little imagination the exhibition The Autonomous Art Practice & The Dream will bring these objects to life.
What if the stored works interpret the voices of their creators, and that these voices forever form a cacophony of conversations, discussions and dialogues?
What, for example, are their views on the financial impoverishment of our arts and culture sector, initiated by Rick van der Ploeg in 1999? And what advice do they have for contemporary artists on how to deal with the big wipe out of 2024 and the collapse of presentation spaces who lost their funding?
Dialogue
In this austere art landscape, CBK Zuidoost presents the intergenerational exhibition The Autonomous Art Practice & The Dream, a group exhibition with artists Yrene van Amstel, Elle van Baaren, Sandy van den Brink and Joanne Igbuwe. Four young makers showing autonomous work and engaging in the conversation between the heritage objects in the room. How do the artists deal with current issues and how is this reflected in their practice? Do they see enough appreciation for their future heritage, the kind of heritage that, by 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 Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE), has designed the exhibition as an immersive installation. A space full of absurdity and a place where decisions are based as little as possible on logic and reason.
More information on the public programme around the exhibition will follow – in the meantime, listen to the podcast series featuring the participating artists: In Dialogue: Season 1 – CBK Zuidoost