KunstRAI x Rietveld Alumni: A Hook’s Eye
3-7 May 2023
KunstRAI, Amsterdam
KunstRAI x Rietveld Alumni: A Hook’s Eye
The Gerrit Rietveld Academie is proud to present 23 emerging artists at the KunstRAI. All participating artists graduated from the independent and internationally oriented art school in Amsterdam in the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. Together, they present multifaceted projects in various media such as painting, photography, installation, textile and performance, on no less than 200 square meters in the Europahal of the RAI in Amsterdam from 3 until 7 May 2023.
The show is curated by Tirza Kater, in collaboration with Public Rietveld & Projects. Tirza Kater is a visual artist and curator, co-founder of the collective artist-run project space Marwan and coordinator of the Fine Arts department at the Rietveld Academie.
A Hook’s Eye
A friend told me that there is a tree full of tongues on Heinekenplein. We went to go and have a look, and only by looking closely did we figure out the tongues were magnolia flowers just before blooming.
Throughout the proposals for A Hook’s Eye, one desire struck as common: that of the artists’ drive to find each other in a group show. Each artist in this exhibition graduated at a time when being close was not a given. And now, venturing out into life after the art academy, that closeness is again adrift. One could wonder: is an art fair the location for such a quest? Could we look at A Hook’s Eye as a proposition in another direction: wandering away from competition and towards proximity and collaboration? A group exhibition as a tree full of tongues?
If we try to re-mix Marc Fischer’s essay ‘Against Competition’ (Blunt Art Text #2, 2006), in which Fischer first reads the art world through the lens of a treadmill made of decomposing shit so devoid of nutrients that even its compost won’t allow anything fresh to grow, and then makes a plea for collaborative models, repetition, re-making, stealing, and coming-together, does A Hook’s Eye propose a parallel cloud within the art fair? An exhibition that presents a collection of works of 23 artists in one large bazaar, all connected through imaginations of a world-wanted within a world-lived?
A hook-and-eye connection is a simple and reliable method of bringing materials together. It can consist of a hook, commonly wire or pipe bent to shape, and an eye of the same material into which the hook fits. In this exhibition of artists in varying stages of their multidisciplinary practices (fashion designers, painters, designers, sculptors, or all of those combined), you will encounter not as much a group of artists-close but more a group of artworks-close: a proximity of materials, objects, tchotchkes, and keepsakes, valuable and makeshift alike: connected through (your) eyes.
Entering from under a roof consisting of a textile installation made of underwear, you might find a hairy vertical cloud and a meters-long drawing that could still be on its roll, a poppy declaration towards Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble”, science fiction stained glass, a video on the longing for a no-longer-reachable home, a sword forged for wxmen fighting, fake coral snakes telling your future, and paintings! paintings! paintings!
A Hook’s Eye, in this part of the fair we invite you to look, listen, and sense - closely and from a distance, take pause and dwell on the edges: think of the story a friend is telling you for the second time, but slightly different.
The 23 participating artists are: Anton Shebetko, Benjamim Furtado, Bonnie Ogilvie, Diesel Lace, Eefje Stenfert, Enzo Aït Kaci, Håkan Karvonen, Ingeborg Kraft Fermin, Joana Velu, Jonas Morgenthaler, Juhee Han, Karin Iturralde, Laura Bouman, Lotte de Jager, Nina Gierasimczuk, Oskar Frere Smith, Qiran Xu, Sanne van Balen, Tasha Arlova, Tasio Bidegain, Vivian Mac Gillavry, Wooryun Song and Yiyi Chen.
See also: