and an exhibition, performance and discussion with Isabel Cordeiro, Jelke de Gooijer, Lina Issa & Fanni Futterknecht, Birgit Knoechl, YU, Katarina Zdjelar
November 26-December 11, 2005

THE PROJECT

"How to send a message" explored how a production process of an (art)work, which is always a traumatic event in itself, could be made visible. It followed the structure of the process of sending a message through the media of contemporary art. In other words, it investigated the complexity of the relationship between sender and addressee (recipient). In this process we are locating the place of contemporary art, which is also the place of the failure to send the message, or in other words, the place of the communication breakdown.

Guests for the project were artist Kendell Geers (South Africa, Belgium) and architect Wilfried Kuehn (Germany).

Milica Tomic (Serbia) is an artist based in Belgrade. Her artistic work includes audio-, video- and media installations, slide projection, performance, conceptual art and net art. Between 1987 and 1992 she scripted several films in which she herself played the leading role. Recent solo exhibitions include: Bild Museet/Umea (2002); Venice Biennial, pavilion for Serbia and Montenegro (2003); ArtPace, San Antonio/USA (2004). She initiated earlier “How to send a message” workshops in Helsinki (November 2003) and in Belgrade (April 2004), in collaboration with the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA).

EXHIBITION, PERFORMANCE, DISCUSSION

The project resulted in a series of presentations at Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam (November 26-December 11, 2005).

Birgit Knoechl: Vegetal Conspiracy 01
Birgit Knoechl’s work developed from an interest in making the lines of a drawing stretch beyond their two-dimensional frame into the space of the viewer. The result are installations with cut-outs, which form a maze or morbid growth of lines that seem to form their own autonomous world as well as to invade and take over the existing space. Knoechl associates these growths of lines with parasitic plants, and thus touches on biological theories as well as science fiction fantasies about the evolution and mutation of vegetal life.

Isabel Cordeiro: Counter Evidence Kit
Isabel Cordeiro’s project for Het Wilde Weten focused on procedures of identification. The work anticipates the near future, when ID cards are incorporated into the body. Existing in time and space implies an ongoing exchange between people and their environment. Our bodies leave behind subtle traces and imprints: an exchange of textile fibers by grazing a passerby’s jacket, a partial imprint of a foot on muddy ground, a lost hair on a train seat. The realization that these elements are proof of our existence and that they can scientifically be linked back to us is both frightening and liberating; frightening because it actualizes a form of control; liberating because it also generates a ground for the reinvention of our identity. This motivated Cordeiro to develop the Counter Evidence Kit, using forensics and biometrics in order to create a self-referential ID set. The kit reverses the principles of a forensics kit: instead of collecting evidence, it allows for planting it.

Lina Issa & Fanni Futterknecht: Explorations behind closed eyes
This collaborative work in progress involves an ongoing series of explorations where our major sense – vision – is taken away, in order to enhance the other senses and to ‘see’ through bodily perception. The artists placed themselves in different social contexts and set themselves various tasks – a dinner meeting, a museum tour, the pedestrian traffic at a busy crossing – with their eyes closed or blindfolded. Their consciousness of vision, their awareness of their bodies, and their experience of time, space and the other bodies around them began to shift. At Het Wilde Weten Issa & Futterknecht presented video works of their joint explorations, as well a performative intervention with a group of people in the public space surrounding Robert Fruinstraat. In each of the conditions in which they work they are confronted with an accidental audience, with whom a relation has to be established.

Jelke de Gooijer: Beloved Belongings
Beloved Belongings is a fictional brand name for products that have lost their original function or use value but are precious because they have come to represent something else – a memory. De Gooijer is interested in the transformation of mass products into objects that are tokens of a personal history. In Het Wilde Weten she will present a fitting room with a growing collection of clothes that are donated or lent to her by different people and labelled with the personal memories that are attached to them. The project relates to De Gooijer’s fascination for personal histories, social behaviour and the idea of the gift.

Open call for a closed meeting: a series of discussions initiated by Katarina Zdjelar
Open call for a closed meeting is a series of semi-public discussions around the subject of language and cultural translation, initiated by Katarina Zdjelar. Zdjelar is interested in the incidental or potential transfer and exchange of knowledge that occurs within a group of individuals who come together around a shared subject of interest. Instead of offering an artwork about language and cultural translation, the artist invites the audience to participate in a discussion on this topic while this discussion will, in itself, involve a negotiation of language and translation between the participants.

YU: Bengali Project
In Bengali Project YU paints a picture of an imaginary Bangladesh. “I imagine that Bangladesh has a special bounty prize offered by the government for red and green products, because of their national colours.” “I imagine that the second generation of Bengali immigrants in the UK has created a ‘New Brick Lane’ in Dhaka.” Bengali Project is not just a humorous take on our false or fictitious preconceptions about faraway places, but also a project about how we distinguish ‘there’ from ‘here’. For YU, who is a Japanese living in Europe, Bangladesh becomes the focal point of her negotiations between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and of her reconsideration of what these notions mean. Her imaginary Bangladesh marks the exact middle (or the empty centre?) between the ‘here’ of her present physical position and the ‘there’ of her mental viewpoint.