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To mark its fifth anniversary, Tent has collaborated with Witte de With to create a complex exhibition that attempts to look simultaneously in several directions. Taking the notion of tracing to suggest searching for evidence from the past and plotting a course for the future, the show marks a point of self-examination for these two very different institutions. Tent’s usual programme focuses on the Rotterdam art scene, giving considerable freedom to artists without overbearing curatorial intervention. Witte de With is distinctly international and, under the direction of Catherine David, has taken a strong politically and theoretically driven approach. The two organisations have been respectively referred to as the guts and the brains of their shared building, but are now facing several challenges to their practice. With the shift in public funding away from direct support for artists to ‘socially beneficial’ projects promoting dialogue between the city’s different communities, Tent is obliged to re-evaluate its position. Similarly Witte de With was censured for being hermetic and insufficiently ‘visual’, resulting in a change of direction.

Into this context, the two institutions invited six external curators to evaluate the condition of art in Rotterdam. While all have some link with the Dutch art scene, they view the situation with external eyes, resulting in a series of concurrent sub-exhibitions and a programme of events.





German curator Andreas Broeckmann uses neuralgia as a metaphor for the painful and hard-to-pinpoint problems of contemporary life, seeing the technological infrastructure of society as its nervous system. The subject of Heidrun Holzfeind’s documentary Exposed (2004) is the physical embodiment of just such a neuralgic attack. A young woman has developed Multiple Chemical Sensitivity so acutely that the only way she can function is to move to a secluded rural house and avoid all synthetic chemicals.

Looking at Rotterdam’s place in this ‘nervous system’ of the global economy, Broeckmann focuses on the 90-day oil reserves stored in the city’s port by the International Energy Agency to stabilise oil prices and for use on the occasion of an energy crisis, allowing the IEA member states just three months to find an alternative to fossil fuels. Ursula Biemann’s documentary Caspian Crude (2004) emphasises the extent to which international policy is dominated by the control of this black gold. Tracing the oil pipeline currently under construction from Azerbaijan to Turkey, she examines its effect on the lives of people along its route. Despite raising key questions about countries as ‘transitory states of flow’, the intentionally blurred ticker tape text and the lack of direct translations of testimonies makes for frustrating viewing. Travelling in the opposite direction, and exploring an alternative source of fuel, is the car, Hout Auto (2001–2), by Joost Conijn, which he drove from Rotterdam to the Black Sea, while filming his journey. Made from wood and powered by burning wood, the car is one of the few truly touching works of the show, revealing a naïve but compelling Dutch utopianism that elicits confused amazement along its path.

Berlin-based artist and musician AGF (aka Antye Greie) presents Explode Baby For Your Reasons (2004), suggesting we blow ourselves up to defeat terrorism. Taking the form of a stream of consciousness text suspended from the wall and trailing across the floor, with an accompanying soundtrack, the piece fails to be altogether convincing, but certain grim phrases are striking: ‘the ones who jump will die too but they have more fun’. A further touch of gallows humour is provided by Dick el Demasiado’s installation How do I tell the people (2004). A cash machine displaying the phrase ‘It’s finished’ plays a song about a dancing ant relaying bad news, presenting a mundane but human view of an economic collapse such as the recent Argentinean crisis.

The area curated by Thomas Michelon, the French cultural attaché in The Hague, explores the problematic relationship between cultural diversity and social cohesion, taking Rotterdam as the starting point for his exploration of how the ‘other’ is perceived and represented. Matti Braun’s archival photographs, footage of a lotus-covered lake and brightly coloured woven rugs, are reminiscent of Eran Schaerf’s multifaceted allusive approach, but are somewhat impenetrable without the exhibition catalogue. In contrast, Melvin Motti’s Stories from Surinam (2002) is a direct yet subjective documentary about the transportation of workers from India to the Dutch colony, told by the few remaining survivors of this early economic migration, which began in 1873 and continued through the first half of the twentieth century. A formally simple work, it provides a fascinating glimpse of a country where Indians, Javanese and indigenous Caribs lived together under Dutch rule. This is particularly interesting in relation to Biemann’s video, with its tales of Colombians sent by BP to work in the Caucasus, reminding us that the globalisation of the market economy is nothing new. Bojan Sarcevic’s Spirit of Versatility (2002) also addresses transfer and adaptation, but quotes Islamic architecture and morphs it through a process of technological origami until it resembles an almost organic form, nestling in a corner of an expanded white cube.

Turkish curator Pelin Tan adopts the role of the ‘other’ herself, visiting Rotterdam and interviewing teachers, policy makers and museum directors about the interaction between institutions and artist-run initiatives in the city, comparing it with her own experience of Istanbul. Carrying her nationality as a kind of baggage, she also invites collaborative and interventionist projects from other ‘outsider’ artists based in Rotterdam, including the ongoing mapping by architect Jan Konings of the places where people can sleep rough, despite a law forbidding sleeping in public spaces.

Czech curator <waanja> compares his experience of public art in a post-communist country with the place it has been afforded in the post-war reconstruction of Rotterdam. He focuses on Kamiel Verschuren, who has managed and catalogued several artists’ initiatives and projects in the district of Charlois, examining how art is used to try and solve social problems. <waanja> also presents two videos by Hieke Pars who uses the sound of public space as an intrinsic element of her work. In Zaanse Kleden (2003) she films the Turkish inhabitants of a block of flats simultaneously beating rugs on their balconies, restaging a regular occurrence to create a hypnotic vision like an animated Andreas Gursky photograph.

The rest of the work chosen by <waanja> involves the observation of behaviour in public space and includes projects by Nicoline van Harskamp, who has catalogued the growing armies of security personnel watching over our cities. Life-size photographs of these guards are pasted to the wall of the exhibition space, keeping a watchful eye over visitors, presented alongside her videos of the public’s reactions to two security agents she installed in a London park and among the shoppers on Oxford Street.

The least tangible curatorial contribution comes from Irish curator Annie Fletcher, who created The Paraeducation Department – a central room in which external groups can gather to talk. Providing a location for the informal moments of exchange or collective learning, the project also seeks to complicate the usual dynamic of events described as ‘educational’ within art institutions, questioning whether education must always entail a distribution of information, or whether it can also encompass the sharing or receiving of alternative expertise.

Amsterdam-based curator Ritsaert ten Cate’s approach is the most obviously personal. Returning to his native city, he asked his contacts in the local art scene to list the artists they considered most important to Rotterdam, then asked those artists to propose a work for the exhibition. Although this deferral of choice results in the presentation of the most painterly and sculptural works in the show – with Daan Van Golden’s flat glossy paintings standing alongside Cathrin Boer’s Making Love to the Darkness (2002), a blacked-out, plastic-wrapped merry-go-round – without reasons behind choices explained, the selection seems somewhat disjointed and arbitrary.

Ten Cate suggests the city’s approach to the arts is ‘loveless’ and concludes his catalogue essay with the appeal: ‘Rotterdam must never tear out its own heart’. Yet this exhibition’s biggest weakness is its absence of passionate engagement with art and artists. For all its interesting examination of the local context, contemporary funding policy and curatorial methodologies, it contains few celebratory works, leaving the impression that art in Rotterdam is intellectually stimulating, but somehow lacking passion.

Zoë Gray

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