Positions

The Van Abbemuseum hosts the first edition of “Positions”, with contributions by five international artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Céline Condorelli, Bouchra Khalili, Charles van Otterdijk, and Koki Tanaka.

With each artist presenting a significant body of work, many produced for the exhibition and others developed through collaborations with art organisations throughout the world, “Positions” explores different tones of contemporary artistic voices.

The five distinct presentations examine how we position ourselves in the world today – often making visible frameworks, subjects and ideas that are felt but not seen. The exhibition unfolds as a conversation between a series of installations, films and architectural interventions that move between different geographical and political contexts and invite us to consider how agency – collective or individual – is both granted and taken away.

The conversation between the artists in “Positions” does not follow one particular thread or trajectory; rather questions surface and re-emerge from vastly different positions. Projects by Charles van Otterdijk, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Bouchra Khalili look at how different sites, locations and even nation states are administered and controlled – and, by inference, how subjects administer their own agency in the world. From an undisclosed site on the Polish-German border to the streets of Cairo to immigrants in Paris, Genoa and New York, a dialogue emerges across different contexts and the people that both control and inhabit these sites. Punctuating these, Céline Condorelli and Koki Tanaka, through a series of objects and happenings, instigate moments of allegiance and shared experience that reveal how alliances, friendships and notions of collectivity create modest but vital moments of political potential. Together, the different projects presented, demand that the viewer engage with a range of contexts and ideas with the position and agency in question oscillating between the subject under discussion, that of the artist and the viewer.

until October 12, 2014
Positions
Five projects in dialogue
curated by Nick Aikens
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10, Eindhoven