Kunsthal KAdE. Balancing acts of extreme precariousness

The acrobatic mammoth by French artist Daniel Firman is back defying gravity. The huge sculptural installation titled Nasutamanus (2012) represents a floating elephant once again, performing a balancing act with its trunk, but this time the creature is featured from a rotated view. Instead of simply conceiving an elephant's version of a handstand, it appears to have suctioned its trunk to a wall adjacent to the floor. The remarkable result is this enormous animal seemingly hovering over the ground. Till January 6th, 2019, Nasutamanus is part of a group exhibition titled “A Balancing Act” at Kunsthal KAdE. The Dutch museum is situated in Amersfoort (Utrecht) , installed within the Eemhuis complex designed by Neutelings Riedijk Architects from Rotterdam. The institution boasts no collection of its own, but with its exhibitions is oriented outward and open to impulses from all over the world. In addition to exhibitions, Kunsthal KAdE organises a public programme of tours, workshops and lectures. Kunsthal KAdE is situated just outside the city walls of Amersfoort. Through the wonderful 15th Century Koppelpoort it’s pretty simple reaching the New City on the River Eem.

Actually the institution encompasses the most extended group show ever focused on interpreting equilibrium’s concept, fostering an artistic itinerary set on different floors. The oeuvre selection occurred is affectedly wide and deliberately not congruent: including from Alex Schweder & Ward Shelley’s ReActor, Half Turn (2016) to Auke de Vries’ sculptures, to a medium-size Alexander Calder’s mobile. But there are even precious oeuvre to linger on. By Jose Dàvila, for example, curators selected Joint Effort (2015) made out of glass, boulders, and ratchet straps. The artist positioned two transparent glass sheets next to a stone, using garishly coloured commercial tie-down straps to contain the tension between these discrete objects. The sculpture appears to be in a precarious balance, like gestures caught between an imminent destruction and permanence. The structure is thereby active: a permanent performative interdependence of things.

Dávila constantly quotes, re-appropriates, and reinterprets art history movements; in these sculptures, he condenses the coldness and precision of minimalism, expressed by raw materials. References to Barnett Newman also make an appearance—not only in the straps that are powerfully reminiscent of his paintings, but also in the way these sculptures seem to deal with the concept of the sublime put forward by the American artist. In a dark room, visitors could also watch A Game of Chess (2011) by Marcel Dzama, a film carried out in Guadalajara, Mexico, encompassing the influence of local crafts and religious traditions. Notions of scapegoatism and resurrection blend with the timeless idea of rivalry represented by the game, and distinctions between reality and fiction ultimately become blurred as both costumed and “real-life” characters in the film are killed. The storyline in this way recalls the Surrealist predilection for dream logic over conventional narrative form—epitomized by Luis Buñuel’s films from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

If Samson Kambalu’s videos Rocking Chair (2017) and Snow Ball (2015) expand the exhibition speculative analysis between mental and physical balancing, the single Job Koelewijn’s photo, titled A balancing act (1998), reports a delicate urban performance placed into a landscape trapped in the claustrophobic space of infinity, like the narrow and eternal world of art history. An everyday landscape that we have seen so often, but now truly visible for the first time, thanks to a balancing act, set in a precarious space and a different time.