An artist talk by: Emily Donnini
Introduction by: Sils Project Space

On the 18th of January, ADA will open its doors for the artist Emily Donnini, who is spending a 4-week period in Rotterdam through the new residency exchange program organised by Sils together with The Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh.

Emily Donnini’s practice explores the room for fluctuation within the study of understanding and hermeneutics, through its simultaneous relationship with antiquity and contemporary methodology and technology. She achieves a non-hierarchical reading of information, codes, and texts by taking a more playful role in the utilization of this tradition. Tampering with history, Donnini makes plausible narratives with falsified information, playing on the expectations of a collective consciousness.
From embedding the rings of a vinyl record into a carved boulder, to cataloguing information from Google through the construction of hand-made paper models, Emily Doninni utilizes a wide array of materials and mediums. Her various materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifested in individual and temporal experience. By working with information containers such as Internet search engine statistics, phonetics of languages, and the fringes of sound technology, a disruption of proximities and distances emerges. Often, Emily’s work is drawn to the failures within these systems. The futility and impossibility, or impracticality of preservation becomes a confrontation with the limits of the known.

Emily Donnini is an artist currently working in Glasgow. After receiving a Post-Baccalaureate degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art.

ADA organises an excursion to Brussels to visit Francis Alÿs’s solo exhibition A Story of Deception at Wiels, Brussels. During the afternoon we will also visit some of Brussels’ smaller art venues.

Francis Alÿs is a Belgium born artist (1959) who lives and works in Mexico City. The exhibition in Wiels has a retrospective character, presenting both iconic and recent works. Among them are paintings, drawings, video, animation and installation, some of which are shown for the first time.

Francis Alÿs’s work often starts with a simple act, either by him or others, which is then documented in a range of media. Working in urban settings and dramatic landscapes, he creates interventions, which frequently address a historical or political concern attached to a specific site. Alÿs moved to Mexico City in the mid 1980s at a time of political unrest. He began to make work which recorded every day life there, capturing images of street sleepers and workers. [Quoted from Wiels’s press text.]

After seeing the show in Wiels, ADA’s tour will continue with visits to some of Brussels many galleries and project spaces, such as Jan Mot Gallery and Établissement d’en Face.

Note:
The train to Brussels South departs at 9:55 from Rotterdam central station. We will arrive in Brussels at 11:42. Anyone who wants to make their own way to Brussels is free to join us there. Please let us know and we will arrange a meeting point.

Press Play: Taking on Performance is the second part of KOLEKTIVA, Calling?, a video correspondence between ADA Rotterdam (NL) and KOLEKTIVA (SI).

As the first part of this correspondence, ADA hosted a film evening presenting KOLEKTIVA’s collection of art videos entitled Fields of the Performative, which reflected on the subject of ‘performing for the camera’. KOLEKTIVA’s collection included videos featuring various formal and conceptual premises present in heterogeneous interpretation of performance in relation to motion picture within contemporary visual art. It is in response to this collection of videos, the Fields of the Performative, that ADA has in turn prepared their video response back to KOLEKTIVA. The resulting collection of videos is entitled Press Play: Taking on Performance.

Programme:
Segundo de Chomón  Les Kiriki, Acrobates Japonais
Ruth Legg  Monster
Jacqueline Forzelius  The Community in Space
Alexandra Gerbaulet  Tatooted Prisoners
Ruth Buchanan  A different kind of love
Rajkumar Santoshi  Tandava Dance (excerpt from Damini)
Martine Stig  Play
Inger Alfnes  Search
Louise Menzies  PELOHA

Runtime total programme: 1h05m

ADA participates in the project Long (Long) Weekend, organised by TENT. Rotterdam, with a series of guided tours on various topics. The tours start in a purpose built waiting room and take the audience through the gallery’s temporarily empty spaces.

For the first tour Everyday Exercise, Maja Bekan and Esmé Valk invite you to get into your sweatpants and move your body in an one hour long workout. This guided tour brings together group movement, choreography and collaboration in an experience that energises the body and the mind. It combines a talk reflecting on group formation with the pleasure of physical activity. Please bring comfortable clothes and sport shoes.

Gerwin Luijendijk invites the bunker specialist Jan Freekenhorst to give a guided tour in which he ‘shows’ two bunkers representative of the Atlantikwall. The Atlantikwal was a coastal defense line built along the western European coast by the Nazis during WWII.

A Brief History of Play is a lighthearted tour into the interrelated history and relationship between play and education. During the tour emphasis is given on the activity of play itself and the participants are invited to play, instead of engaging in the topic on a purely conceptual level.

Margo Onnes has developed an audio tour called The Artworks You Have Never Seen.
Onnes’s audio tour leads the visitors trough a story of unfinished artworks as they walk trough the empty gallery spaces of TENT.

Programme:
13:00 Everyday Exercise by Maja Bekan and Esmé Valk (Please bring sports clothes)
14:30 Bunkers by Jan Freekenhorst, organised by Gerwin Luijendijk
15:30 A Short History of Play by Deirdre M. Donoghue
16:30 The Artworks You Have Never Seen, an audio tour by Margo Onnes
16:30 A bar will be open in the waiting room during and after the audio tour.

It is not necessary to make a reservation and it is possible to attend one or several guided tours separately. However, because of the nature of the activities, public arriving while a tour is taking place will be requested to wait in the especially created waiting room until the next tour starts.

ADA is pleased to announce the first part of KOLEKTIVA, Calling? a video correspondence with the artist group KOLEKTIVA from Slovenia.

ADA will be hosting a film evening presenting KOLEKTIVA’s collection of art videos entitled Fields of the Performative, which reflects on the subject of ‘performing for the camera’. The selection of art videos is part of the third edition of the Video in Progress-exhibition project as curated by KOLEKTIVA. The videos feature various formal and conceptual premises present in heterogeneous interpretation of performance in relation to motion picture within contemporary visual art. Everything from a regular performance in front of an audience in a gallery space, to an exhibitionist and voyeuristic presentation of a body as an aesthetic object to the performance of absurd actions and the exploration of identity and social and political roles are all present in this selection. A list of the artists included in the collection can be found here.

At ADA this collection of art videos is meant to be viewed as an initiation of ADA’s correspondance with KOLEKTIVA and it will function as an assignment or an invitation for ADA to reply back to KOLEKTIVA with a collection of art videos in turn to be shown in Slovenia.

KOLEKTIVA is a group of three visual artists based in Ljubljana, Slovenia: Vesna Bukovec (1977), Lada Cerar (1974) and Metka Zupanič (1977).

“We started to work together as an informal group in 2003. In 2008 we decided to form the group KOLEKTIVA in order to make a bigger division between our individual and our collective work. All of us also work as individual artists. We have all graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 2002. Metka Zupanič and Vesna Bukovec received MA in 2005 and 2006 at the same Academy. In our group projects we are focused on the research of inter-personal relationships, everyday life and the art system. Individuals, art public, passersby or specially targeted groups represent an important role in our work. We invite them to take an active part in the creative process and become co-authors of the work. We understand the process of art making as a means of negotiation, exchange and cooperation.”

Lieke Snellen is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. In the project The high performance of the shape she builds a new installation, reflecting on the shapes found in front of the RAAMTE space. Snellen wants to question these shapes and define their functions. What are those shapes? Are they symbols, or do they only reflect a shadow?

In her work, objects and the human body are seen as forms that take on another character or function in connection with the surrounding architecture. Aesthetics and classic sculptural rules are combined with formal experiments through which she connects daily life objects and all sorts of self-created elements. The performative character of her sketches, videos and photographic works activates the sculptural work. For Lieke, a sculpture represents an activity, which can push the material beyond its limits. Her sculptures take a performative role within the space and challenge its architectural ideology and social relations.

For a period of two weeks Esmé Valk presents a preview of her recent project Showcasing Todays Essentials. Esmé has observed the changing window display of Anders dan Anderen, a shop specialised in home textiles. The shop’s display windows have formed the starting point for her research into the relationship between commerce and idealism, the body and geometry and the viewer and the performer. She is interested in investigating a direct link between theatre, avant-garde artists and the shop window, as well as in asking how the contemporary use by commerce of modernistic imagery has shifted its meaning.

For RAAMTE Esmé Valk will present a site specific sculpture that uses the stage-like window display of ADA. With light, movable, two-dimensional materials she makes a layered set that aims to be 'visually tactile.

You are all welcome at the opening of this third RAAMTE presentation and to enjoy a drink together. The work will be on view until the 8th of August.

Due to unexpected circumstances tomorrows performance with Katarina Zdjelar and Jan Verwoert is canceled. Were very sorry to notify you on such a short notice.

P for Performance is pleased to announce as its thirteenth performative event:

Deserters’ Heartland, a performance by Katarina Zdjelar and Jan Verwoert

Katarina Zdjelar (Belgrade, 1979) is an artist based in Rotterdam. Her practice consists of making video, sound and text pieces, performances, book projects and creating different platforms for speculation, knowledge building and exchange. Her work explores notions of identity, authority and community and revolve around individuals who challenged by simultaneous inhabitation of different languages, perform themselves through practicing, remembering or reinventing themselves.

Jan Verwoert is a Berlin based, internationally renowned art critic and sometimes curator. He is a member of the advisory board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been a guest professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2005 he has been a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Verwoert is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for Afterall, Metropolis M, Springerin, and artists’ catalogues.

P for Performance is part of an ongoing project by Maja Bekan, entitled Secret Powers for Identity, Security and Self-respect in Troubling Times.
The aim of these performance events is to try to critically engage with the investigation of the artist’s role as a producer and advertiser.

Spend a lazy Sunday afternoon at ADA with a movie marathon, outside games and fresh party food. With good weather we will spend the time outside, watching movies and enjoying freshly prepared summer food.

Program:
15:00 Chinatown, Roman Polanski, 1974, 130 min
17:10 The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkovski, 1986, 149 min
20:00 Volver, Pedro Almodóvar, 2006, 121 min
22:00 You The Living, Roy Andersson, 2007, 95 min

Chinatown
Jake Gittes, a private detective, is hired by a woman who claimes to be Mrs. Mulwray. She suspects her husband, the builder of the city’s watersupply system, of having an affair. Shortly after Jack Gittes is hired the real Mrs Mulwray appears on stage and Jack discovers that he has been hired by an imposterer. When Mr Mulwray is found dead, Jake gets into a complex web of deceit involving murder, incest and corruption. Chinatown is a multi-layered psychological drama that features many elements of the film noir -genre.

The Sacrifice(Offret)
Alexander, a journalist and philosopher, celebrates his birthday at his cottage in the countryside. The news that a nuclear war between the superpowers has started disturbs the celebration. As his family attempts to cope, Alexander is troubled by extraordinary dreams. To save the world he decides to sacrifice all he loves. The Sacrifice, Tarkovski’s final masterwork, is remarkable for it’s long tracking shots.

Volver
The two sisters Raimunda and Sole are struggling with life after having lost their parents in a tragic fire four years ago. Their elderly aunt who lives alone speaks as if Raimunda’s and Sole’s mother is still alive and taking care of her in a small Spanish village. After the aunt’s death, Sole’s mother “appears” again to fix the situations that she couldn’t resolve during her life. Volver is a ghost story that combines drama and absurdist comedy.

You The Living
Set in a décor of a miserable colourless nowhere-town, You The Living follows the lives of an overweight woman, a disgruntled psychiatrist, a heartbroken groupie, a carpenter, a business consultant, an elementary school teacher with emotional issues and her rug selling husband. Anderson spent three years on the set that was completely built for the film. This tragicomic story that explores the “grandeur of existence” is reminiscent of the Buster Keaton and Jaques Tati films.

Eric Martijns work seeks to create a new set of spatial agreements wherein architecture seizes to be that superimposed structure and becomes the object of man centred measurement itself.

Creating sculptural constructions, mostly as spatial obstructions, Eric Martijn questions existing parameters and the experience of space. In this process he is inspired by the materials that construct space, with concept and sculpture in mind.

For this second RAAMTE presentation, Eric Martijn will make a sculptural intervention in the window space, which will be an interpretation of the ADA building facade and its literal corner function.

You are all welcome at the opening of this second RAAMTE presentation and to enjoy a drink and “Hollandsche Nieuwe” (salt herring).