studio Claus Wiersma

Eye Filmmuseum presents the exhibition Jan Švankmajer – The Alchemical Wedding devoted to the work of Czech surrealist and master animator.
This is the first major retrospective of his bizarre and dark films and sculptures in the Netherlands. The exhibition at Eye features one big installation in which numerous short films by Švankmajer are screened amidst remarkable sculptures and ‘spirited’ images, together with three Wunderkammers filled with collages, tactile objects, sick maps and ‘medium’ drawings.

For Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) graphic art was a medium he could experiment with to his heart’s content. Picasso produced over 2,500 prints in a great variety of techniques. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has nearly four hundred of these prints in its collection, a selection of more than seventy of which will now be shown at the Kunsthal. Some of the highlights in the exhibition ‘Picasso on paper’ include the colour linocut prints depicting still lifes, bull fights, scenes from mythology and especially women. Picasso taught himself the technique of the colour linocut in 1958, when he was already well into his seventies. This exhibition also marks the start of ‘Boijmans Next Door’, a collaboration between a number of Rotterdam museums to keep part of the Boijmans collection visible in the city over the coming years.

Truth, facts, memories, reality: are they all constructions? The artists Broomberg & Chanarin, Omer Fast, Chia-Wei Hsu and Meiro Koizumi deploy not only film and video but also slide projections, photographs and sound to investigate and ‘unmask’ the past.
Reportage, re-enactment, documentary and filmic techniques are some of the strategies that these artists apply to expose the subjectivity of historical sources and the limitations of memory. In stories set in various places around the world, they investigate the construction of narratives and the manner in which stories change when told and retold from different perspectives.

The works on display shed light on the history of conflict zones, those places in the world where truth and fiction are brought into sharp focus. Broomberg & Chanarin, Omer Fast, Chia-Wei Hsu and Meiro Koizumi look at the representation of war. Can a war be recounted? Is it possible to depict a war? And what is the role of the artist in this regard? These questions act as catalysts for various stories, many of them unknown or forgotten, events that happened in World War II and the Cold War, as well as more recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A continuation of the manifesto Beyond the New, A Search for Ideals in Design, launched during the 2015 Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan. Various installations invite the visitors to reflect on how different contexts affect the appreciation of functional things. The exhibition raises questions on the gap between how we experience design in daily life and how we read the meaning and value of those objects in the context of a museum display.

Design of a kitchen, build-in cupboards and stairs for a dwelling in Rotterdam