‘We are the narcissistic generation’

24 Sep­tem­ber 2015
Erik Viskil, Look­ing for Clues – From West­kun­st to All the World’s Futures

1 Octo­ber 2015
Geo Wyeth, performance

8 Octo­ber 2015
Nazmiye Oral

29 Octo­ber 2015
Kad­er Abdolah

5 Novem­ber 2015
Mouni­ra Al Solh

12 Novem­ber 2015
Mar­joli­jn Van Heemstra

19 Novem­ber 2015
Nico­laas Veul

26 Novem­ber 2015
Annabell Van den Berghe

3 Decem­ber 2015
Petra Stienen

17 March 2016
Juli­acks: Archi­tec­ture of An Atom

24 March 2016
Duran Lan­tink: Sis­taaz of the Castle

7 April
Manon van Hoeck­el: In Lim­bo Embassy

14 April 2016
Hannes Barnard: A Ris­ing Tide Lifts All Boats

21 April 2016
Jeroen de Lange: The White Man’s Bur­den
Thier­ry Ous­sou: The Oth­er Way, Together

12 May 2016
Vin­cent Meessen & James Beck­ett: Per­son­ne et les Autres

19 may 2016
Nana Adu­sai Poku: Post- Black Dark Matter

4 Feb­ru­ary 2016
Said El Haji: The School of Mixed Love

11 Feb­ru­ary 2016
Elke Kras­ny: Transna­tion­al Curating

18 Feb­ru­ary 2016
Jesse Dar­ling: Thing does­n’t Need a name

3 March 2016
Ren­zo Martens & Quin­sy Gario:

10 March 2016
Anouk Nuyens, Aid

In the sec­tion ​‘Sprek­end’ of the Dutch news­pa­per NRC Han­dels­blad, TV mak­er Nico­laas Ver­heul speaks of his new doc­u­men­tary, titled Super Stream Me. Togeth­er with Tim den Besten he will stream his life over the course of three weeks –he walks around with a tiny cam­era attached to a kind of self­i­e­stick– which unsur­pris­ing­ly imme­di­ate­ly changes, because nobody wants to engage in an inti­mate con­ver­sa­tions with him. How­ev­er, that is where his psy­chol­o­gist comes in, who brings to dis­cus­sion why Ver­heul is actu­al­ly enjoy­ing all the atten­tion too.

‘We live in a time of nar­cis­sism. We are focused on who we are and what we can get, instead of on what we can give to oth­ers. Social media aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the dri­ving force behind it, but they do have part in a more and more exten­sive navel-gaz­ing. We speak of ​‘online shar­ing’, but rather you send some­thing into the world, only in the hope to receive some­thing back. I con­stant­ly feel the need to be fed with exter­nal atten­tion. It is this we hope to find online, but actu­al­ly we hard­ly ever get there what we real­ly want: love.’

Ear­li­er, Nico­laas and Tim made a doc­u­men­tary on the Gay Pride and gay-rights in Ukraine, where he end­ed up in a ver­i­ta­ble man­hunt of gay haters. Nev­er had he felt so scared. ​“I hope we can show that the world is not just ​‘famous and shiny.’” he said.

In this dichoto­my –nar­cis­sism fueled and made vis­i­ble by the same media that engages and con­nects peo­ple in glob­al con­flicts through vast amounts of infor­ma­tion– the con­tem­po­rary artist too must find its way.

We are bom­bard­ed with imagery of adver­si­ty and cat­a­stro­phe in var­i­ous parts of the world and we can’t just remain look­ing at our­selves in the mir­ror. Immi­grants climb over four-meter tall fences and risk their lives try­ing to reach Europe in small boats. In their attempt to cre­ate a world where only the Sharia laws apply, peo­ple are decap­i­tat­ed by IS of which the imagery is spread through the inter­net and shared with the whole world. The behead­ings seem to be a form of rad­i­cal icon­o­clasm, the ulti­mate ges­ture of some­one being silenced, not only in a grue­some but espe­cial­ly in a visu­al man­ner.
These are hap­pen­ings that we can­not avoid any longer. They have become impos­si­ble to circumvent.

An artist is not a jour­nal­ist, because per­son­al obses­sions and fas­ci­na­tions lie at the core of his prac­tice. ​‘What are you good at? What do you do with great plea­sure?’ and ​‘Who are you, what real­ly keeps you busy?’ How­ev­er, in what ways do artist con­nect their own themes with what’s going on in the world? Engage­ment can be man­i­fest­ed in abstract ways, like in the per­for­mance of Fabio Mau­ri, or it can pro­vide com­fort; as artist Daan van Gold­en puts it: ​‘Art is consolation.’

This years’ Studi­um Gen­erale attempts to dis­cuss this dichoto­my and its con­se­quences for the arts. From the same start­ing point this Studi­um Gen­erale exam­ines the impact of glob­al­iza­tion on the art world: (by approach­ing) ​‘moder­ni­ty as an inter­cul­tur­al phenomenon’.

In 2007, Doc­u­men­ta 12 took place in Kas­sel. The respons­es to this Doc­u­men­ta were very divid­ed, but above all they were neg­a­tive; the exhib­it­ed art­works escaped ​‘good taste’ in all pos­si­ble ways.
De New York Times wrote (on june 22): Doc­u­men­ta 12 asks us to do a lot of think­ing: about mor­tal­i­ty, about the obso­les­cence of moder­ni­ty, about how to live an eth­i­cal life through art. But it advances its ques­tions qui­et­ly, and a bit too qui­et­ly: the result­ing low visu­al impact is a major flaw. The show is every bit as social­ly engaged as its video-heavy 2002 pre­de­ces­sor, but pack­ages its pol­i­tics in a dif­fer­ent way, in unmon­u­men­tal objects and instal­la­tions by under­sung, not to say unknown, artists. (…) The work too small, pri­vate, under­done, done-before.

Researcher and writer Erik Viskil came back from his vis­it to Kas­sel with ent­hou­si­asm. He was as sur­prised by the over­all reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the exhi­bi­tion as the crit­ics in the news­pa­pers. Though, at some point it occurred to him that we must learn to look dif­fer­ent­ly, rather than judge by default. A judge­ment that more­over is deeply root­ed in an art his­to­ry framed by west­ern stan­dards.
In a time where every­one trav­els the world, it is of great impor­tance to rec­og­nize the ori­gins of our ways of see­ing and think­ing, to set in motion a true glob­al­iza­tion of the arts, in which every­one can par­tic­i­pate.
Erik Viskil will talk about how he per­ceived the Doc­u­men­ta 12 and this years’ Studi­um Gen­erale explores the ways in which the glob­al­ized arts have devel­oped ever since. Doc­u­men­ta 12 was devised by artis­tic direc­tor Roger M. Buergel and cura­tor Ruth Noack fea­tur­ing work by 109 artists from 43 countries.

Three ques­tions where cen­tral to the exhi­bi­tion:
Is moder­ni­ty our antiq­ui­ty?
What is bare life?
What is to be done?

This sec­ond ques­tion under­scores the sheer vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and com­plete expo­sure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our exis­tence from which no mea­sure of secu­ri­ty will ever pro­tect us.

We cre­ate an exhi­bi­tion in order to find some­thing out.
We cre­ate a Studi­um Gen­erale pro­gram to find some­thing out.

Cura­tor: Hanne Hage­naars
Coor­di­na­tor: Marthe Prins
Posters: Gilles de Brock

Immi­grants climb over four-meter tall fences and risk their lives try­ing to reach Europe in small boats. In their attempt to cre­ate a world where only the Sharia laws apply, peo­ple are decap­i­tat­ed by IS of which the imagery is spread through the inter­net and shared with the whole world. The behead­ings seem to be a form of rad­i­cal icon­o­clasm, the ulti­mate ges­ture of some­one being silenced, not only in a grue­some but espe­cial­ly in a visu­al manner.

These are hap­pen­ings that we can­not avoid any longer. They have become impos­si­ble to cir­cum­vent and we can’t just remain look­ing at our­selves in the mirror. 

At the same moment one could say that we live in a time of nar­cis­sism. ​’We are focused on who we are and what we can get, instead of on what we can give to oth­ers. Social media aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the dri­ving force behind it, but they do have part in a more and more exten­sive navel-gaz­ing. We speak of ​’online shar­ing’, but rather you send some­thing into the world, only in the hope to receive some­thing back. I con­stant­ly feel the need to be fed with exter­nal atten­tion. It is this we hope to find online, but actu­al­ly we hard­ly ever get there what we real­ly want: love’ said Nico­laas Veul in his lec­ture about his tele­vi­sion pro­gram Super Stream Me (a ²⁴⁄₇ live stream of his life).

An artist is not a jour­nal­ist, because per­son­al obses­sions and fas­ci­na­tions lie at the core of his prac­tice. ​’What are my qual­i­ties? What do I do with great plea­sure? What real­ly keeps me busy? And, what defines me?’ Yet in what ways do artist con­nect their own themes with what’s going on in the world? And how do their prac­tices –be they artis­tic, cura­to­r­i­al, or aca­d­e­m­ic– engage in and open up these com­plex, though fun­da­men­tal (socio-) polit­i­cal dis­cours­es? Engage­ment can be man­i­fest­ed in abstract ways, like in the per­for­mance of Juli­acks, the fash­ion designs of Duran Lan­tink or the instal­la­tions of Thier­ry Oussou.

In this para­dox –nar­cis­sism fueled and made vis­i­ble by the same media that engages and con­nects peo­ple in glob­al con­flicts through vast amounts of infor­ma­tion– the con­tem­po­rary artist too must find its way. This years’ Studi­um Gen­erale attempts to dis­cuss this dichoto­my and its con­se­quences for the arts.

The sec­ond part of Studi­um Gen­erale’s ​’We are the Nar­cis­sis­tic Gen­er­a­tion’ will be extend­ed by a more geo­graph­i­cal frame­work, Africa: twelve peo­ple from dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sion­al fields will –among oth­er top­ics– address the colo­nial his­to­ries that pre­dom­i­nate­ly deter­mine strate­gies of urban plan­ning, the neo­colo­nial real­i­ties of mate­r­i­al resources, eco­nom­ic and ide­o­log­ic prob­lem­at­ics of char­i­ty and the lin­guis­tic appro­pri­a­tion of a medi­a­tised ​’black­ness’.

In a more gen­er­al way, the lec­ture-series aims to break with a posi­tion towards art which anno 2016 remains strong­ly euro-centric.

by Hanne Hagenaars