Nikolay Alutin
projects, about

Landscape with Bear

Dates
May 2 — June 1, 2019

Venue
De Appel Amsterdam

Project website
deappel.nl

Within the archives of De Appel lies an accumulation of objects – of artworks, props, leftovers, and unidentified materials – that have come to be known as its Collection (Unintended). Unintended because no-one made the decision to begin assembling them, nor seeks to add to their number, nor governs their categories. Starting from the eccentricity of this collection, Landscape with Bear presents a single continuous topography that blurs the line between art object and display. Building from the proposition that practices of collecting are part of regimes of knowledge-production, this exhibition asks, what kinds of knowledge can emerge from the fragmentary, the uncertain and the unstable?

This project has been developed through a collaborative process between 13 individuals from fields spanning curating, art history, architecture, design and archaeology. The Collection (Unintended) is ambiguous: it has an interpretive flexibility, a material structure and granularity that means that things might be individually removed without collapsing or changing the structure of the whole. For this reason, it is plastic, occupying a space between communities of practice and allowing for cooperation across disciplinary borders. Over the past six months, this group of participants have gathered with and alongside the physical objects of the collection to consider modes of access, and meanings that can be untangled from these relations. From these meetings, participants have developed a series of interwoven narratives that materialise as sound, image, physical architecture and text throughout the space of the exhibition.

With
Nikolay Alutin, Bruno Alves de Almeida, Dita Birkensteina, Alisa Blakeney, Cookies, Sofia Dourron, fanfare (Lotte van de Hoef, Freja Kir), Jan Hüskes, Aram Lee, Aude Mgba, Miguel John Versluys, Shen Xin.

Press
"The productivity of eccentricity"
Metropolis M, 06.05.2019

Photos
Konstantin Guz, Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk