Positions
Five projects in dialogue
5 July–12 October 2014
Opening: Saturday 5 July, 3pm
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10
Eindhoven
The Netherlands
T +31 (0) 40 238 1000
info [at] vanabbemuseum.nl
On Saturday 5 July, the Van Abbemuseum opens the first edition of Positions, with contributions by five international artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Céline Condorelli, Bouchra Khalili, Charles van Otterdijk, and Koki Tanaka.
Positions is a new exhibition format that sets a series of projects in dialogue with one another in the ten galleries of the museum’s old building. With each artist presenting a significant body of work, many commissioned for the exhibition and others developed through collaborations with art organisations throughout the world, Positions explores different tones of contemporary artistic voices.
The five distinct presentations examine how we position ourselves in the world today—often making visible frameworks, subjects and ideas that are felt but not seen. The exhibition unfolds as a conversation between a series of installations, films, architectural interventions and publications that move between different geographical and political contexts and invite us to consider how agency—collective or individual—is both granted and taken away.
Positions 2014 includes:
– Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b. 1985, Jordan), Tape Echo, 2013–14
Noisiness, a new cassette produced by Abu Hamdan, accompanies Tape Echo.
– Céline Condorelli (b. 1974, France), The Company She Keeps, 2014
The Company She Keeps, edited by Nick Aikens and Polly Staple and published by Book Works, Chisenhale Gallery and Van Abbemuseum (2014) accompanies Condorelli’s presentation.
– Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975, Morocco), The Speeches Series, video trilogy, 2012–13
– Charles van Otterdijk (b. 1976, the Netherlands), Double Centre, 2013–14
Double Centre, edited by Nick Aikens, Charles Esche and Charles van Otterdijk and published by Book Works, 2013, accompanies Van Otterdijk’s presentation.
– Koki Tanaka (b. 1975, Japan), Precarious Tasks, 2012–ongoing
The dialogue does not follow one particular thread or trajectory; rather questions surface and re-emerge from vastly different positions. Projects by Charles van Otterdijk, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Bouchra Khalili look at how different sites, cities and even nation states are administered and controlled—and, by inference, how subjects administer their own agency in the world. From an undisclosed site on the Polish- German border to the streets of Cairo to immigrants in Paris, Genoa and New York, a dialogue emerges across different contexts and the people that both control and inhabit these places. Punctuating these, Céline Condorelli and Koki Tanaka, through a series of objects and happenings, instigate moments of allegiance and shared experience that reveal how alliances, friendships and notions of collectivity create modest but vital moments of political potential. Together, the different projects presented, demand that the viewer engage with a range of contexts and ideas with the position and agency in question oscillating between the subject under discussion, that of the artist and the viewer.
Curator
Nick Aikens
Collaboration partners
The projects were realised in collaboration with Beirut, Cairo; Book Works, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Museum as Hub; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and Stroom Den Haag.
For more information on Positions you can visit www.vanabbemuseum.nl
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Funders
The exhibition Positions is made possible with the support of Ammodo and Stichting Promotors Van Abbemuseum.
