Hendris Lot

The Poetic Condition was a show of multifaceted visions in diverse media on engaged personal connections with history, culture and social worlds by 13 artists based in the Hague and New Zealand.

Brit Bunkley’s St Cyricus looks like a doll from a by gone age but is a 3D scan of a 1470-80 marble statue of the child saint by Italian Renaissance sculptor, Francesco Laurana.
Bunkley saw this statue in the Los Angeles Getty museum (view this statue) and was intrigued by the idea of a saint being a child. The story goes that in about 200-300 AD, that the child while being held by the governor (while the child’s mother, Saint Julitta, was on trial) the child stated that he was also a Christian and bit the governor. For this act of defiance the child was killed. Other stories tell of him being brutally tortured. The Renaissance artist incorporated symbols of sainthood such as the palm and laurel branches, and the cut off body suggests that he might be in a cauldron. The recasting of this in dark grey plastic with the addition of artificial flowers, makes the work an enigma because both aspects of social history (the religious and the art context of the statue at present) are simultaneously referenced and distanced.

Lake Alice Water-tower, from the abject history series, is another sculpture by Brit Bunkley created with 3D printer from scans of an existing structure also with a flower insert. Perhaps this work is nature vs culture, or nature out of culture. Water towers are still iconic structures in small New Zealand towns. This tower, in particular, makes reference to another aspect of New Zealand’s abject history, the infamous rural pyschiatric institution, Lake Alice. Like many New Zealand psychiatric hospitals, Lake Alice was self-sufficient, with its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, and fire station as well as its now questionable practices on its inmates. It closed in 1999.

The flower could be a sign that nature always endures, always has some measure of self-sufficency, while the static cultural innate object gains or loses meaning if its function is lost. However in foregrounding the materiality of these sculptures, such as details in the greyer than grey facades, he reminds us that this is still artifice, it is still plastic, and in the end this is a sculpture of oppositions that forces us to take our own stance.

The gallery space was dominated by Anne Wellmer’s soundscapes from her 3 videos played in a loop. Medieval chanting, whisperings in German and English, sounds, narration, instructional or provocative texts connected us with individualistic collaborative worlds. The 9 minute animation Een Rode Citroen (A red lemon), was a surreal exploration of a mutating organic inner and outer ‘strange-scape’ in which eerie sounds and the evocative text (in English) by Jewish-French, Algerian-born poststructuralist feminist, Hélène Cixous complemented biological galatical worlds.

Another video Vox Sanguinis (Voice of the blood), was a teaser for the music theater performance by Cora Schmeiser with new compositions inspired by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) by 4 Dutch composers: Giuliano Bracci, Kate Moore, Lukas Simonis, Boudewijn Tarenskeen and Aliona Yurtsevich. The sound design and live electronics were by Anne Wellmer. Vox Sanguinis toured to four cities in the Netherlands in 2015.

The whisperings in German in the video Transfusionen (Transfusions) spoke of medieval beliefs about witches using the blood of children to make medicine and the various uses (transfusions or transmutations) of this medicine, including the making of wine.

The sounds from these three videos were the soundscape of this show unless one put on headphones to listen to two of the other videos in the exhibition. Under two spatial abstractions of wire by Michelle Backhouse was the suite of videos, Kāinga a roto (Home Within), by Sonja van Kerkhoff (More >>) and around the corner was the 29 minute video, Et in Arcadia Ego by Channa Boon.

Et in Arcadia Ego was filmed in the former Soviet Union during an artists’ roadtrip. While historical events are the carrier of the film, a chess game, played by two residents of Odessa, sitting near the city’s Arcadia Beach, is the physical link connecting the different locations: the Aral Sea (Uzbekhistan), Odessa (Ukraine) and Tbilisi (Georgia). This film ends when the chess game is over, but the large-scale power game that is still being played out in the former U.S.S.R. is not over. Stalin’s cotton industries for example, founded by him in Central Asia, are still the reason why large parts of the Aral Sea are gone and the entire region is polluted. It has turned out to be the largest environmental disaster of the 20th century. In this work, Boon investigates the idea of location as a carrier of information, which any individual or being can tap into, just by being present at a given spot. Conversely, the film aims to show the system of thoughts and ideas that, throughout history, has created both the physical landscape and those who live in it; how it has affected the way they think and act; and how a collective consciousness has been formed in the past and is still being formed in the present.

Virgil’s phrase ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ is also the title of a famous painting (1638) by Nicolas Poussin. The painting shows a group of shepherds who discover the phrase on a tomb, and so become aware of the existence of death in their Arcadian existence. This gives them the capacity to reflect and thus develop self-awareness. In this video, Boon connects this loss of innocence of the Arcadian shepherd – signifying an ideal world that is destroyed forever – with the present and past of the former Soviet Union. Hence, the phrase becomes a reference to the ideal world that Communism aimed to bring about in this region and the nostalgia that it still invokes.

The works surrounding this video were a pull and push on this theme of the romantic: Michelle Backhouse’s wire grid in colours that referenced nature and yet were unnatural in a formation that was both plant-like and yet inorganically abstract, woven baskets by Brenda Tuuta and Adrienne Spratt juxtaposed with works bearing politicized texts, and Brit Bunkley’s plastic model of the Disneyland castle recast as a ruin.

Martje Zandboer’s suspended photographic emulsion teabags, Thom Vink’s models and photographs and Sanne Maes’ mixed media video loop develop this pull and push into dialogue between the familiar and the other, estranged or mysterious. Adrienne Spratt’s basket below, reads as an empty vessel while its title alludes to a spirit filled essence.

On the other side of the gallery space are two more woven vessels by Adrienne Spratt. The enormous basket sways from numerous lines. Its title refers to both connection and enclosure.

Edward Walton’s gestural abstract paintings are like signatures or ‘nature traces’ while Michelle Backhouse’s paper pulp, building paper and mixed media, Girl with Iberian Lynx, from the species facing extinction series, references the tangible topic of environmental responsibility.

On the adjacent wall a frieze relief of reproductions of paintings from Hohepa’s War / No War series uses Maori cultural symbols as commentary issues of the day. Below this is a small purse-like open pingao (a New Zealand natuve yellow grass) basket by Brenda Tuuta.

In another corner lines flow out from the red basket, Pouhine by Adrienne Spratt, which blur its contours. The title refers to the pattern woven into the sides.

The heart of Hohepa’s work is a dialectical process – fed from his Māori heritage. He descends from the tribes: Ngāti Whakaue, Tuhourangi, Tuwharetoa ki te Aupouri, Tapu Ika, Rangitihi, Uenukukopako, Te Arawa, Ngāpuhi (Whangaroa), Ngāti Kai Tangata. These small reliefs are prints of 1 x 2 metre paintings from the War / No War series exhibited in 2017 in the Chiesa San Antonio, Lecce, a Baroque church in southern Italy.
The video Cleaning the Air is actually a recording of a mobile sculpture which animates various household cleaning objects while in the video, Daily Dishes, the mundane chore of doing the dishes is turned into an animation of colour and pattern. Pietertje van Splunter’s videos are like a poetics on the mundane: housework. Her brooms seem animated by an unearthly force and the constant stacking of the differing tribes of kitchen utensils suggests a game with secret rules. In using humour with the overkill her videos are reminders that the everyday domestic, is also a microcosm of the amusing, perhaps necessary banality of habit while Michelle Backhouse’s sculptures use seemingly banal materials, building paper, netting or house paint to create ethereal protusions.