Exhibition | 11.10.2020 – 07.11.2020 | ART BAR in collaboration with PrintRoom (NL), supported by Kunstcentrum Stroom

With: Kees van Leeuwen, Elena Kostenko, Karolina Rupp, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Tomasz Skibicki, with curatorial support from Yindi Chen and Alexandre Richardeau

The pop-up exhibition, Towards a Foreword, was consciously curated to be largely visible from street view, so as to accommodate the prospect of renewed lockdown regulations. As it happens, a week after the exhibition opened, such a lockdown was announced.

The exhibition echoes an earlier, unrealised exhibition proposal – a proposal that was originally intended to be our first collective project, prior to the onset of the pandemic. Diverging from that original plan, which was more so preoccupied with existing works each artists’ oeuvre, Towards a Foreword adopted a spirit of questioning – dwelling in uncertainty, and reclaiming that sentiment as one offering a sense of potentiality and curiosity, rather a cause for inflated anxiety. The exhibition presented a varied constellation, comprised of works-in-progress responding to the nuances of the exhibition space, existing works, and what we name as ‘experimental, open-ended material queries.’

We approached the exhibition as an pedagogical exercise, questioning how to work together under precarious conditions. Naturally, this led to confronting/being confronted with how the nature of that precarity varied from one person to another. In kind, themes such visibility, fragility, fortification, and enclosure/exposure are traceable in the presented works.

Once the aforementioned lockdown came to an end, we presented a public programme in parallel to the exhibition in Rotterdam West’s Leeszaal, featuring talks by Kees van Leeuwen and Tomasz Skibicki, as well as a presentation about the collective’s methodology (delivered by Hannah Dawn Henderson and Karolina Rupp). This programme also served as a book launch for 15 03 20.

An interactive, virtual floorplan of the exhibition was created by Rupp Media. It can be explore here.

Photographs provided by Tomasz Skibicki, Hannah Dawn Henderson and PrintRoom