Vanaf 24 januari te zien

From the series Udongo | #09 | 2009 | 120 x 170 cm | edition of 7 | c-print

Voor het eerst toont Singer Laren de nauwelijks bekende topcollectie van Henk en Victoria De Heus-Zomer. Sinds 1989 verzamelt het echtpaar hedendaagse beeldende kunst van over de hele wereld. Uit deze inmiddels zeer omvangrijke collectie toont Singer Laren een selectie van Nederlandse schilderkunst, beeldhouwkunst en fotografie. In de tentoonstelling is werk te zien van 

Ben Akkerman, Erik Andriesse, Jan Andriesse, Karel Appel, Armando, Hannah van Bart, Tjebbe Beekman, Jasper de Beijer, Koen van den Broek, Constant, René Daniëls, Jan Dibbets, Rineke Dijkstra, Desirée Dolron, Marlene Dumas, Ger van Elk, Edgar Fernhout, Guido Geelen, Joris Geurts, Kees de Goede, Daan van Golden, Herman Gordijn, Frank van Hemert, Hering a/Van Kalsbeek, Hans van Hoek, Pieter d’Hont, Willem Hussem, Alex Jacobs, Folkert de Jong, Rob van Koningsbruggen, Omar Koubâa, Juul Kraijer, Atelier van Lieshout, Lucebert, Marc Mulders, Peter Otto, Michael Raedecker, Jan Roeland, Viviane Sassen, Jan Schoonhoven, Marien Schouten, Han Schuil, Piet Tuytel, David Vandekop, JCJ Vanderheyden, Toon Verhoef, Emo Verkerk, Koen Vermeulen, Henk Visch, Carel Visser, Co Westerik, Robert Zandvliet, Ronald Zuurmond, Ina van Zyl

nouvellesimages.nl/

The Empire Project presents Jasper de Beijer’s solo exhibition “MARABUNTA”.

17 January – 2 March 2013

From the series Marabunta | #029 | 2012 | 86 x 120 cm | edition of 7 | c-print

Marabunta is the title of the second solo exhibition of Dutch photographer Jasper de Beijer. In each of his prior photographic series, De Beijer has created elaborate models in his studio out of paper and other sculpture materials, based on images from media and historical sources, and often concerning colonialism and its representation. In each series, he approaches the very nature of historical depiction, using varying modes of photography and questioning culturally embedded images.

With Marabunta, De Beijer takes the paraphernalia of the Mexican drug war as his inspiration, particularly the mystical and visually obsessive interest in celebrating the flamboyant lives of its leaders and colorful deaths of its victims. De Beijer carves a world in Marabunta that is alarming, chaotic, and reverential – an unnerving amalgam of the omnipresent iconographies of death.

Ominously dominating more of our news, the cartel wars in Mexico have resulted in increasingly more outrageous acts of murder and mayhem. Bodies are beheaded, covered in warnings and signs, left in broad daylight and in city centers. A pre-existing culture of skeletons and ghosts, festive and even fanciful, coincides with the idolization of these killers and criminals, resulting in gigantic extravagant mausoleums resembling churches, and a general conflation of the gaudy shrines with those of beatific martyrs and saints. De Beijer exploits these glorified graveyards and bloody scenes of murder in his hyper-detailed, entirely fantastical staged scenes.
With frenetic color and texture, a frisson of the real and media-influenced, and constant hints at the fabricated nature of De Beijer’s images, the photographer never quite allows a specific point in the continuum between the real and the imagined for the viewer to land. In De Beijer’s afterworld, the characters are eerie facsimiles of living ghosts, one foot made of plastic, and a face of duct-taped tattooed texts.

The resulting strange purgatory is then multiplied: as the outsider, De Beijer forms his own mythology, interweaving distorted and refracted visions gleaned from reality. In his version of the afterlife, the dead refuse to die, and the horror of their living days shines brightly and yet ominously, refusing to be put out.

theempireproject.com

Hidden stories from our own collection – 30 november 2012 until 14 july 201

 

From the series Udongo | #07 | 2009 | 170 x 120 cm | edition of 7 | c-print

An African power figure meets an Apple computer, and an artwork with portraits by Marlene Dumas encounters a German sample card of forty different eye colours.

Tropenmuseum present’s an ode to its collection in the exhibition Encounters. Hidden stories from our own collection.

Encounters of two objects

Very different objects are paired with each other: contemporary art, popular art, utensils, objects used during rituals, and trivial or even extremely valuable things. What do they say about the world of then and now, about image forming and contacts between different cultures?

Seven themes

You can discover 55 encounters between objects arranged in seven themes. The encounters give an impression of what the Tropenmuseum has experienced, thought and collected in its turbulent history from the 19th to the 21st century, and hence also an impression of what links the Netherlands with the rest of the world. The themes are: Voices from the past, Today’s world, Animals and people, Museological issues, Looking at the ‘other’, Coincidence? and Form and function.

Exhibition catalogue

The exhibition catalogue contains full-colour illustrations of all 55 combinations with explanatory texts. Two introductory essays discuss the character of the objects and the remarkable history of the Tropenmuseum’s collection.

For sale in the museum shop and via www.kitpublishers.nl | € 24.50 | Dutch and English edition | graphic design: Roosje Klap | 192 pages.

tropenmuseum.com