In this Window Show, I exhibit packages, letters and postcards which I’ve sent to my home ad-dress while doing research in Valencia, Spain. I’ve left Amsterdam to do an exchange with the University of Valencia, to learn Spanish and follow, among others, a course in Spanish Cinema. While making notes on drifting in the city as by Situationist Guy Debord did or reading Tarkovski’s Sculpting in Time, I have made walks and bicycle tours that lasted for the free time granted to the user of the so-called Valen-bisi, a system that allows you to pick up a bike on one side of the city and bring it back on the other side. Maps, found objects and images reflect my trips. I have en-larged some of these fragments for the latest Artistic Research exhibition in NIeuw Dacota, Amsterdam and related them to my experience of time. 

How does memory work and what role do physical objects play in this? This small project is an exercise in observing myself: what do I want to keep in an envelope in the end of the day? Is it worth a small walk to the yellow mailbox in Valencia? What I have found worthwhile to send to myself? The collection of yellow and brownish envelops is an archive which will not be opened. The way it is exhibited is not determined by me but by the way a friend in Amsterdam has arranged it. The sending to myself works as a delay

 April 6th until 28th of April 

Finissage: 28th of April from 15:00 - 19:00

'Are you interested in the trace, the print? 'Yes, in all traces, prints, marks that we leave: footprints, prints on skin, hand movements that change the room, breath. The print means a border, the border of a body when touched, border of an object by being touched. At this intersection the visual and tactile unite.‘ ‘ Could be stated that you work with a minimum of traces?’ ‘The trace is a visual minimum. In art I use the least visible trace a man can leave behind. The trace is the less constructed image that can be called art.'

-Giuseppe Penone 

In the month of April,  Christine van Royen will exhibit two works at the Windowshow_ that encounter the subject of the classification of flowers from a different angle, both conceived in a rather private environment.

One work will be based on a photograph of that was taken during a former presentation at CaféChercher (Café for unfinished art projects). A delphinium, a fennel and a poppy were brought in and every participant was asked to look at the plant and describe what she or he saw. It turned out that many described the poppy by its papery leaves, the delphinium for its flowers and the fennel for its delicacy. My own question was if anyone would notice the thing that Goethe found so interesting about the fennel and the delphinium, namely the way the plant changes when growing upwards, inleave and flower. It does not grow as by recipe, but makes smaller leaves and branches whengrowing taller. A kind of harmonious reduction. The poppy he found interesting in the way itforms its stamen. The work will be focussing on the micro emotional approach of the visualityof classifications.

The second work will be based on the essay written for the tutorial by the RKD Visiting Fellow Sarat Maharaj, at the Stedelijk Museum in 2018. All participating students created an impression of the Apartheid-era Art History Room, The Prehistoric & Art Practice as Knowledge/Non-Knowledge. My contribution consisted of a 19th century watercolour of a flower covered with mould, thus strangely reflecting the decay of the colonisation and reflecting the days of discovery new plants and fruits. To reflect on the work From Angola to Vietman by Christopher Williams, which was the topic of my essay, I made two cyanide prints that were also part of the work in the room at the Stedelijk. One is of a fern and one of the National flower of South Africa, the protea. In 1989 the National flower of both Namibia and South Africa was the Cotyledon orbiculata. Williams made a classification that is underlining the biased nature of any classification system. From the loose gathering of works in the Apartheid-Era Art History room, Christine wanted to make one work, reflecting on this biased nature of classifications and their political implications.

The works are meant to approach classifications differently: micro-emotional and visual versus theoretical and political. Also there will be a transition from the shared experience with other students towards the autonomous works, that can be shared with anonymous people.

Mapping Shame

by Andrea Knezović

March 1st - April 5th, 2019

Finissage: April 5th, 17:00-20:00

“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them.”- Martha Craven Nussbaum

The project Mapping Shame  investigates the dynamics between the notions of singular (intimate) and plural (public) conceptions of shame, and how these notions interrelate and structure our social environments. Glimpsing into the understanding of the notion of shame, we can argue that shame is a quintessential human emotion that navigates and governs our affects, cognitions and performance through malignant and anxiety-induced sensation. It is master emotion that plays a crucial part in identity formation and is interrelated with fear and doubt. 

The differentiation between guilt and shame is that guilt is triggered by specific behavioral consequences, whereas shame is rooted in self-identification processes of individuals and society. The project Mapping Shame is an ongoing research and creative experimentation regarding the notion of shame and its applications, as well as how shame serves as social tool for measurement of values and collective and individual performance. Here, in the discrepant space between the intimate and the communal, we hold our anticipations as we project and reflect on the idea betwixt singularity and plurality. 

Andrea Knezović is a visual artist and researcher, completing her Masters in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. Her practice explores threshold states and ambiguities within social contexts. She uses her creative process as an instrument for reconstructing social paradigms involving the notion of shame and liminality. 

Knezović has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, 12 Star Gallery London, The Israeli Center for Digital Arts. Her work is part of the SCCA-DIVA Archive collection and was nominated for the Essl Art Award in 2013 and 2015.

Rustenburgerstraat 385 

by Christina Ntanovasili

Exhibition duration: 02/02-01/03 

Finissage: 01 March, 17:00 

HOW TO TURN A HOUSE INTO A BOOK is the response to a window, an address, a sleeping space, a working space, curtains and doors, tense wires of past and future curtains, hanging, a door with a lock with a curtain, a bed with a door as a frame, the sound of the blinds, a made up entrance, with holes on top of doors, three ladders, cream, pink and pistachio green, pipes disappearing, the heat from underneath. The work is a matter of documentation as translation, of the traces of use, wear and presence; of what makes Rustenburgerstraat 385 (also) an interior.

A material translation in five volumes and a site-specific text. 

With the documentation of the house edited as a publication -from frames to pages- and the movement in space translated into the page-turning motion of a flipbook, I wonder what can be grasped to share publicly, what a private publication, so to speak, could be.

What I have learned with the book-making process of this translation is about the specific intimacy that makes this space what it is. The particularities can only be personal, intimate, but simultaneously they offer an interpersonal experience, a way of coming together. A collective conception instead of an abstract perception. 

So, how can we conceive of this house? Perhaps, by way separation is enabled. By doors, curtains, permission to enter or stay put, all of which feel implicit. The locks are there, as there are curtain rails, blinds and ladders. It is intriguing not to see the house according to its function -an interior questioned by a public show window- nor according to the ingenious ways that make it function. I was inclined to think of the house as an example of what life in space can look like. Which is not only a matter of visibility. The window, after all, is omitted from the work, as well as the walls. 

Making some of the space public, was not to expose or make it explicit, but rather a transfer from one volume to another, from interior to paper. Not a matter of adjusting scales, from space to an object, either, but an attempt at conceiving what seems to escape real time and real space.

...what seems to escape real time and real space.

A material trace was left behind from Sabrina Huth and Ilana Reynolds’s performance work titled ‘You are here’ (see Archive). Written on the window glass, the trace of their past presence YOU ARE HERE converses with the title of my work, ‘Rustenburgerstraat 385’, which is the name of the address of this particular here where you are. Or one was or might be. These ‘interpersonal fictions’ within titles and address names are realities as well. They do not superimpose space, they too have volume, like a speech bubble, and help bind matter into place, like papers touching bricks and rocks do, in suspense. 

Christina Ntanovasili (1989, GR) was trained in architecture and currently is completing her master degree in arts and culture. Her work and research concern notions of space, language and paper. 

> You are here <

by Ilana Reynolds & Sabrina Huth 

Getting closer and closer...

Leaving traces for each other...

Moving in the reverberation of what the other just did...

How can we encounter each other without being in the same time-space? And what do we share? How does imagination and fiction of the other provide a potent and present space?

Ilana and Sabrina have never physically met and for the past four months they have been collectively researching topics of absence, the space in-between and inter-personal fictions. Through letters, stories, small dances and books, they have shared a repertory of traces of each other’s absence. During their five day cumulative research in the w_show, they continue to explore the absence of the other by building, re-inventing and re-composing their traces as an ever changing process. This process-oriented event is to be shared for audience passing by.

In the upcoming five days for five hours each day we will inhabit the show window in De Pijp`s lively neighborhood. We will share the same space at different times. Feel warmly invited to pass by and share our process!

• • Wednesday (16.01.): 12:00-17:00

  • Thursday (17.01): 17:00-22:00

  • Friday (18.01): 12:00-17:00

  • Saturday (19.01): 17:00-22:00

  • Sunday (20.01): 12:00-17:00

On Sunday, the 20th of January, at 17:30 will be a presentation of the process @ show_win! Please come and join us for drinks and absent presences!

During the period of the w_show exhibition, Hanna Steenbergen-Cockerton has played with moments of unintended voyeurism and the need for privacy. By making use of the two-way mirror as a medium on the surface of the large window pane, elements of both the English net curtain and the Dutch open curtain phenomenon are combined. 

You may have noticed, whilst walking through the streets of Amsterdam, that many homes leave their entire interior open for the passer-by to see. Windows are often large and in abundance. When it gets dark, the lights go on yet the curtains remain open, allowing you to have a full and unobstructed view into intimate living spaces of strangers. Not only discovering different types of aesthetic tastes, but also tv habits and personal behaviours. Having been born in England, this often leaves me confused to why the Dutch seem to have no problem leaving their interiors open for the world to see.

          In England, the net curtain is pretty much an institution. A net curtain entails a lace like structure, that is permanently hung in front of a window. The nature of its surface construction; translucency, allows for light to defuse through, yet retains an element of privacy to the space behind the window. This way, the net curtain facilitates the ‘(…) examination of the outside world without permitting introspection.’[1] In sharp contrast to the net curtain, the open curtain phenomenon leads to moments of unintentional voyeurism, causing possible moments of confrontation and discomfort upon the passer-by. It is in these moments where I realise a cultural difference, the window pane suddenly activates a blurred boundary between the public and private domains. As an instant reaction, the open curtain phenomenon stirs a need within me to cover these gleaming panels of light and restore the divide between the closed, private spaces within homes and that of the open public street.  

The first mention of the two-way mirror goes back to the early 20th century when the subject of the Emperor of Russia Emil Bloch filed for a patent for “transparent mirror” in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S, where he lived at the time. His design of a two-way mirror became the standard for almost all future models, enabling a thin layer of silver or aluminium to be reflective just like regular glass, but also enabling the back surface of the mirror to become transparent when a strong light is flashed towards it. Essentially, two-way mirrors function like regular mirrors in brightly lit rooms, however, allow clear viewing from the room that is sufficiently darkened. Some light from the darkened room does penetrate through the mirror into the bright room, but the users in that room are not able to perceive it because the reflection of the strong light in the mirror overwhelms the small amount of light that is passing through it.

          Today, the two-way mirror has become especially useful in relation to surveillance (interrogation rooms and security areas in public spaces) and for reality television, where almost every wall of the sets are reflective surfaces, with camera personnel observing behind them. 

[1] Nevin, Charles, ’Minor British Institutions: Net curtains’, Independent, March 19 2011

(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/minor-british-institutions-net-curtains-2243796.html)