You are cordially invited to our second Artists Weekend: a weekend full of artist talks, presentations, conversations and poetry readings, from Friday December 15 till Sunday December 17 in H401. The Artists Weekend is part of our 2017 year programme The Female Perspective, curated by Nina Folkersma. This programme focuses on issues around female identity, feminism and gender, both in relation to the historical context of H401 and its founder Gisèle, and to current events.
The 2nd Artist Weekend is devoted to Women + Craft + Poetry. Guests of honor are two of our artists-in-residence, Aimée Zito Lema and Renée Turner. At their invitation, and in dialogue with curator Nina Folkersma, various artists, curators, writers, weavers and poets are invited to present their work and ideas.
Friday, Dec 15 20:00 – 22:00
at H401, 1017 BP Amsterdam – Note: The public entrance is at the back of the building in the Beulingstraat.
Entrance fee: 5 euro (incl. drinks & snacks)
Introduction to the Female Perspective Series: Nina Folkersma
Lecture Christel Vesters – Some notes on women, labour and textile craft
Triggered by two unrelated news items about textiles, writer and curator Christel Vesters embarks on an expedition, looking for a common thread that may connect the two. Her explorations touch upon particular events and ideas in the history of textile production, utopian socialism, the Arts & Crafts Movement and the women’s movement, juxtaposing some key moments in those histories with examples from contemporary artist practices.
Saturday, Dec 16 14:00 – 18:00
Entrance fee: 5 euro (incl. drinks & snacks)
Conversations + Presentations – Renée Turner, Joke Haverkorn van Rijsewijk and Kate Briggs
We spin yarns to tell far-fetched stories, our life is envisioned as a complex tapestry, and the past is woven into the present. Narrative and weaving are often associated with each other through the metaphors we use. Join us for a day of presentations and discussions that look at weaving as a hands-on craft and its relation to the act of writing. Renée Turner will talk about her research project the Warp & Weft of Memory and have a conversation with Joke Haverkorn van Rijsewijk about her work at the weaving studio De Uil (The Owl), where she made monumental tapestries for Gisèle and other artists. On view will be some of the images from De Uil and a few of the woven artefacts from Gisèle’s collection. Kate Briggs, author of the recently published book This Little Art, will be drawing analogies between weaving and the processes of writing, translating and storytelling.
Drinks + Fingerfood by Mina Abouzahra
Sunday, Dec 17 14:00- 18:00
Entrance fee: 5 euro (incl. drinks & snacks)
Readings + conversations – Aimée Zito Lema, Becket Mingwen, Iva Supic Jankovic and School der Poëzie
This afternoon Aimée Zito Lema will introduce her residency project and research on friendship as a form of resistance. Thinking of the house (of Gisèle) as the most intimate and private kind of archive, connected to daily life experiences, she will read one of the transcripts of her conversations on friendship. The afternoon will continue with a presentation and poetry reading by visual artist Becket Mingwen. Becket’s text responds to politics and friendship as mirrors of each other – the same pitfalls and promises reflected between the interpersonal and the public. For the presentation at Castrum Peregrini, he will engage these ideas with Zito Lema’s project by discussing the role of friendship in the making of art, allies, and enemies, while exploring many of the ambiguities between them. Iva Supic Jankovic will present a musical performance called House on the Water. Music is a very intimate part of Jankovic’s work- sharing such work within this specific context allows a certain degree of vulnerability and intimacy that is hard to find in a regular art space context. The afternoon will end with poetry readings by teenage students from the School of Poetry, presenting the outcomes of their workshop organized by Zito Lema in collaboration with Dasja Koot.
Drinks + Fingerfood by Mina Abouzahra
Participants over the three-day series:
Mina Abouzahra studied at the Wood and Furniture School in Amsterdam. She has a passion for wood, textiles, copper and marble. A red thread in her life is the combination of different cultures. With the same attitude, Mina was active in the world of food; she wrote recipes, developed food concepts, organized pop-up restaurants and produced with Merijn Tol (Arabia) the cookbook Proef! Orange blossom, the new Moroccan cuisine. The designs of Abouzahra are surprising and colorful, and inspired by a continuous search for new combinations of materials, shapes and production methods. Mina Abouzahra travels every few months to Morocco for inspiration and to search for old, rare and beautiful things she can import, both for her shop and for clients directly.
Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. This Little Art, a long narrative essay on the practice of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in September 2017. She teaches on the MFA in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.
Joke Haverkorn van Rijsewijk is a weaver and writer. With Nenne Koch in 1956, she founded the weaving studio De Uil in Amsterdam. Their first commission was for a tapestry by Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht for the SS Statendam, and later four more tapestries for the clubroom of the S.S. Rotterdam. Haverkorn van Rijsewijk has recently written an essay, ‘Living and Love in Image’ (Leven en liefde verbeeld), reflecting on a tapestry she made based on an image by the German Expressionist August Macke.
Becket Mingwen received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014, and was recently a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, NL. Recent exhibitions include “n n” at One Gee in Fog, Geneva; “From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Words to the World” at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. His book on Chris Kraus’ 1996 “Chance Event” is forthcoming from Athénée Press.
School der Poëzie, School of Poetry, offers lessons to children and young people to get them acquainted with poetry, writing and performing their own poems. Tailor-made programs and lessons for schools and institutions. The ‘School der Poëzie’ derives its name from the collection of poet Herman Gorter (1897) and a famous poem by Lucebert (1952). http://www.schoolderpoezie.nl
Iva Supic Jankovic, visual artist (born in Croatia), studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and received a Master degree in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy, The Hague. She produces long term collaborative and trans-diciplinary projects that challenge an question the borders of visual art. More info: http://www.zoldermuseum.com/wordpress/
Renée Turner is an artist, writer and Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Currently as an artist in residence at Castrum Peregrini, Turner is working on a two-year research project ‘The Warp and Weft of Memory’. Funded by the Mondriaan Funds, her research will result in public lectures, an exhibition and an online narrative, which combines images from Castrum Peregrini’s archive, artefacts from Gisèle’s closet and Turner’s own reflections on memory and objects of heritage.
Christel Vesters studied Art History and Curating in Amsterdam, New York and London. She is a writer and curator, and currently works on a two-year research project Touch/Trace – researching histories through textiles, which unravels the intricate connections between textile, history and society from a contemporary art perspective.
Aimée Zito Lema, visual artist (born in Amsterdam, 1982, grew up in Buenos Aires) studied at the University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam in 2015-2016. Currently an artist in residence at Castrum Peregrini, she is working on a research project about friendship as a form of resistance.
*Image courtesy of Castrum Peregrini, all rights reserved.*