Exhibition view, from left to right: Boris Meister “Above the Cloud – Archeology of Social Networks” (2012), Sebastian Schmieg and Silvio Lorusso “56 Broken Kindle Screens” (2012), Ruth Beale “Now From Now” (2011), Klaus Scherübel “Mallarmé, The Book” (2004). Copyright Les Territoires, Montreal.
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is an independent curator, writer and director of The Office for Curating based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He curated the group show Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici (50 Years From Now), currently on view at Les Territoires in Montréal (12 March – 19 April 2014). The twelve artists collective exhibition posits the book as art object, container and concept against the backdrop of ongoing discussions addressing the potential demise of the physically bound volume. Lekkerkerk explains in his interview his urge to look into the dynamics of co-existing analog and digital formats within our current media driven society, to raise the key question: “To what extent have the changes in our relationship with information – and the formats we employ for its transmission – altered our rapport to knowledge and its production?”
M-KOS [MKOS]: How did you develop Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici into a curatorial project?
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk [NJL]: From a personal perspective, the exhibition Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici is the culmination of a previous exhibition cycle entitled Reading Complex, which I developed at various locations in London throughout 2012 together with curator Catherine Y. Serrano. At the time we were interested in – generally speaking – further exploring the relations between viewer-reader and image-text in the context of visual art and artistic practice. For instance, we wanted to look into the fact that we, as viewers, make a narrative reading – an ABC reading – of principally every encounter, whereas the visual evidence we “collect” in order to inform this reading is often incongruous and misplaced. We wanted to link this principle, inherent to our (over)stimulating image-culture, to by what means narrative arcs are employed in artistic practice, and how the connecting of the dots is left to the visitor, so to speak.
Continue reading “The remainder of the book and other variable formats – Interview with Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, curator of “Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici” at Les Territoires, Montréal”
