Exhibits,

Sanne Vaassen and Tim Breukers being as becoming: liberating-art and/or liberating art

Catalogue:
Interview with Sanne Vaassen

“being as becoming: liberating-art and/or liberating art” is a collaboration between public gallery and publisher Onomatopee (NL) and artist-run space Bus Projects (AU). The project integrates notions of ‘the contemporary’ and aims to assert the added qualities of artistic production in our life. Does art liberate and/or should it be liberated?

In life, we operate with responsibility in our surroundings. As we progress from the here and now of our contemporaneity, we encounter various conditions by chance, conversations, technical opportunities and more. Artistic practice takes off from this practice based responsibility and releases different ensembles of conditions along the organising principles of various creative practitioners, which by offering new expressions bring awareness within the on-going newness of contemporary life and culture.

Fore-fronting this direct contact with our surroundings from within the artistic practice, this project will contest the moral legitimacy of the ethics of modernism in arts and culture, will economically contest the under the invisible hand of monetized artistic circulation, will contest the traditional autonomous viewpoint of artistic practice, and will discuss the liberal agenda of cultural civilization at large.

Devised by Onomatopee’s founding director Freek Lomme in association with Bus Projects director, Channon Goodwin, this endeavour vibrantly incites the independent art spaces and their inhabitants along the living qualities of the practice itself. Pushed by the premises of a thought-experiment, the project will promote dynamics over fixedness, and generate responsible and progressive imagination along various conditions involved, leading up to a more conclusive bundling in the eventual publication.

Both exhibitions will feature open-studio or residency-like situations, which will be documented in a logbook/diary of causes and consequences written by local critics who follow the artistic process and will be visually recorded and shown by means of a stop-motion camera. At Bus Projects Dutch artists Sanne Vaassen and Tim Breukers will inhabit the space and engage conditions on site. Breukers embraces chance and opportunity in an outgoing, all-embracing manner that challenges ideas on the causality of wonder and opportunity, while Sanne Vaassen gives prominence to the motion of the unremarked, engaging with the fundamental, implicit existence of the natural elements that surround us. The artist will install themselves during the opening of the exhibition and de-install / pack during the finisage, stressing the ongoing dynamics of production and life throughout the show. During both exhibitions, visitors can engage in an ongoing on-site correspondence with critics/lecturers Sebastian Olma (writing from NL) and Johanna Drucker (writing from the US). Graphic design for the project will be delivered by Pierre Martin (FR); exhibition design by Dave Keune (NL).

– Premises –

• if we understand everyone as an amateur in the dynamic face of progressive and experimental contemporaneity;
• If we understand contingency of opportunity a factor of artistic production;
• if we understand art as a dynamic service, rather than a static object only to be judged through a density of texts;
• if we understand the artistic rendition as a key to understanding art as a push for life;
• if we position the poetic momentum as a dynamic factor in engaging our subjective momentum;
• if we understand this dynamic as an open source of possibilities, rather than a paternalistic causal narrative;

  then how should the viewer engage, how should the art world deliver and how should artists position themselves in this arena?

1 / 2 – Bus Projects Melbourne April 11 – May 5

Opening Wednesday April 11, 6-8 PM
Featuring artists Sanne Vaassen and Tim Breukers
The artists will be available for conversations every Wednesday from 6 PM.

2 / 2 – Onomatopee Eindhoven September 7 – October 7

Featuring artists Philippine Hoegen and Alex Farrar
The artists are available for conversations every Friday at 6 PM.

Credits:

Curator, editor and producer: Freek Lomme
Co-curator at Bus Projects / advisor: Channon Goodwin
Graphic design: Pierre Martin
Exhibition design: Dave Keune
Artists: Sanne Vaassen, Tim Breukers and more to follow
Confirmed contributing critics and writers: Sebasian Olma, Johanna Drucker, Steven ten Thije, Martha Buskirk.
Made possible thanks to the Mondriaan Fund, the province of Noord-Brabant

Publication
To be released September 2018

Photography by Christo Crocker.