- BOOK LAUNCH, PREMIERE AND LECTURE3 April 2016, 3pm
Launch of Wendelien van Oldenborgh's monograph, with Netherlands premiere of From Left to Night and screening of Bete & Deise, and lecture by David Dibosa
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, David DibosaStedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Teijin Auditorium× Ed. Pethick E., Van Oldenborgh W., Amateur, Sternberg Press, 2016
Tickets: Entrance fee to the museum plus €2,50
Reservations: reservations@stedelijk.nlOn Sunday 3 April, a new monograph of the artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s work, entitled Amateur, will be presented at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The presentation of the book will be accompanied by the Netherlands premiere of Van Oldenborgh’s latest film From Left to Night (2015), a screening of her earlier work Bete & Deise (2012), and a lecture by author and curator David Dibosa, who has been a key player in a number of Van Oldenborgh’s films. The artist alongside The Showroom’s Director Emily Pethick, If I Can’t Dance’s Director Frédérique Bergholtz and assistant curator at the Stedelijk Museum Britte Sloothaak, will provide an introduction to the publication and the afternoon’s event. Bete & Deise (2012) will also be on view during opening hours on Saturday 2 April, and before the launch on Sunday 3 April. The screening will take place in the Stedelijk Museum’s Teijin Auditorium.
Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Van Oldenborgh’s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters on film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions.
The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and who each offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre. These authors include: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, and Grant Watson.
Amateur is published in conjunction with the Heineken Prize for Art, which Van Oldenborgh received in 2014 and is supported by the Mondriaan Fund. Amateur is edited by Emily Pethick and Wendelien van Oldenborgh with the assistance of David Morris, designed by Julia Born, and co-published by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; The Showroom, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin.
Amateur: Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Edited by Emily Pethick and Wendelien van Oldenborgh with David Morris
Designed by Julia Born
Published by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, The Showroom, and Sternberg Press
ISBN 978-3-95679-191-8
Order from If I Can't Dance via shop@ificantdance.org
Price: €35,– Launch discount €25- The programme of If I Can't Dance is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the municipality of Amsterdam, the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, and Ammodo. If I Can't Dance is a member of Corpus and Performance Platform.
The launch of Amateur and the Netherlands premiere of From Left to Night is organised by the Public Program of the Stedelijk Museum and If I Can’t Dance in collaboration with the artist. Amateur is made possible with the support of the Heineken Prize for Art and the Mondriaan Fund.
About the films and speaker David Dibosa
From Left To Night (2015) is an experimental film production in which a number of seemingly unconnected players, places, events, subjects and histories, drawn from a complex London neighbourhood—an area of deprivation bordered by the wealthiest sites of the city—meet through a two day film shoot: five people, three locations, and the different subjects and forms of knowledge, which they bring with them. These range from urban tensions, such as unresolved histories of the 2011 London riots, to new feminist and racial theories, music videos, 1960s idealist architecture and the personal ways in which each of the protagonists relates to these. The film was commissioned by The Showroom, London.
Bete & Deise (2012) stages an encounter between two women in a building under construction in Rio de Janeiro. Actress Bete Mendes and Baile funk singer Deise Tigrona have—each in their own way—given meaning to the idea of a public voice. Together these women talk about the use of their voice and their positions in the public sphere, allowing for the contradictions they each carry within themselves to surface. Through a montage that evocatively combines the voices of the women with their image, Van Oldenborgh confronts us with considerations on the relation between cultural production and politics and the potential power that is generated when public issues intersect with the personal. Bete & Deise was commissioned as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Edition IV – Affect (2011–2012), and was shot in Capacete’s premises in Rio’s Gloria district four years ago. The film has since been presented at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, and at various institutions and festivals internationally, including a recent tour in Brazil.
Dr. David Dibosa is the co-author of Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (2013). He trained as a curator after receiving his first degree from Girton College, Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London, for a thesis titled, ‘Reclaiming Remembrance: Art, Shame and Commemoration’. During the 1990s, David curated public art projects, including In Sight In View, a billboard project in Birmingham, as well as in a sculpture park in the West Midlands. From 2004–2008, he was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London (UAL). He remains at UAL, where he is now Course Leader for MA Curating & Collections at Chelsea College of Arts. David has appeared in two of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s works, Lecture/Audience/Camera (2008) and La Javanaise (2012).
