For If I Can’t Dance’s Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016), Joke Robaard has been commissioned to produce a series of workshops and a new film.

Using her image archive of photographs collected from fashion magazines and other media over a thirty-eight year period as a starting point, for her commission Robaard will perform her archive through a series of workshops and the documentation of seven assemblages of images, accompanied by captions and texts, on film. Through this, Robaard will read the historical, political and social information embedded within the images.

The development of her film will be punctuated by public moments, in which Robaard will perform her archive with composed groups of seven protagonists who will be invited to read the assemblages from their own positions and perspectives in front of an audience. These live moments will further Robaard’s work with the configuration of groups of people – such as networks of friends, colleagues, companies and neighbours – within which she has often ‘directed’ them during photo-sessions, to show how things shift in social situations and in relation to one another by means of attitude, behaviour, looks and clothing.

By using non-linear, subjective and critical approaches to the readings of each assemblage of images, Robaard will further her interest in thinking through her archive in terms of patterns of peoples’ clothing behaviours and how clothing works, rather than in terms of ‘fashion’. In this way, her archive can be seen as a mapping of everyday clothing and how the principles of montage, assemblage and appropriation are at work in our culture at large, and might be reflected in the methodology of film. The commission will also be complimented by the production of a new publication.

Biography

Joke Robaard (b. 1953, Meppel, the Netherlands) is an artist/researcher and teaches theory in the TXT (Text and Textile) Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In her art practice Joke Robaard operates at the interface of social research, material culture and photography, and connects these with philosophy, textile and fashion theory. Through her work she investigates the configuration of groups of people, for example in networks of friends, colleagues, companies and neighbours. She often ‘directs’ individuals in such groups to assume certain positions and patterns in relation to one another, which are then photographed, and from which she uses clothing to illustrate where the connections lie and how they are constantly shifting. Her work is based on a huge collection of images and texts relating to the represented body and people’s clothing behaviour patterns. Her archive can be seen as a cartographic record of everyday clothing. Recent exhibitions include: Get Real/Real Self, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem (2011); Does it Work. How does it work? Opera Aperta, the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2011); Model and the Other, MUHKA, Antwerp (2009); Endless Shirt, Stadtmuseum Graz, Austria (2007); and Stand-in, Secession, Vienna (2003). Joke Robaard lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.