WHILE WE WERE WAITING
A group show by the Photography Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Location: MELKWEG EXPO, Entrance via Milk, Marnixstraat 409
Open: Tuesday - Sunday, 12:00 - 17:00
Duration: Saturday 11 December until Wednesday 29 December.
With works by: Aino Lehtonen, Anton Shebetko, Athanasios Fakkas, Heleen Kosse, Michel Sylla, Samuel Simpson, Snorre Petlund, Andreas Frellesen, Antonia Sanchez Armendariz, Charlie Spiegelfeld, Jordi de Vetten, Romina Koopman, Simon Pillaud.
The Photography Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie has been invited by Melkweg Expo to showcase a selection of current projects that students have been working on during this fall semester of 2021.
While We Were Waiting signifies the first public appearance of the Department after a period of forced dormancy, due to the Covid pandemic. The title refers to our collective experience of waiting for new beginnings and new opportunities to share our works with the public.
The exhibition presents an exploration of themes such as belonging and estrangement, terror and corruption, desires and insecurities, memory and absurdity, virtual journeys and real places, motherhood and heritage, the portrait and the statue, totems, and human rights.
“How to bring something into focus that is not directly in front of our camera?
How to engage with concerns that reach us through our screens, our newsfeed, through books or stories, yet exist outside our own immediate physical environment?”
“What values do I want my work to represent? What is the value of my work as an artist? How does the art market work? What is value in the context of things increasingly disconnected from traditional materiality? How can I get paid for my work? What is the economy of international art education?”
“How would we describe a hypothetical state of ‘a world without images’, related to our current personal needs, dependencies and habits of image production and consumption? What significance do terms like ‘seductive lies’ and ‘conscious blindness’ hold in the context of our photographic-image driven culture?”
“We will break from normativity and liberate our artistic expression in its pure form. We’ll dive into the void of paradoxes, between rationality and the absurd, concepts and raw emotions, belonging and authenticity!”
The narratives contained in these questions all share a decisive relevance to the medium of photography and its connection with current concerns in society; technological dependencies, social identity, collective responsibilities, all these are negotiated through our contemporary image-culture.