Post by pieter on Sept 16, 2016 21:41:38 GMT -7
INTERNATIONAL ARTS | THE ART OF COLLECTING
Dutch City Makes the Most of Its Park, and Its History
By NINA SIEGALJUNE 16, 2016
“VVest Life,” a work in progress from KUNSTrePUBLIK, an artist collective based in Berlin, in Sonsbeek park. The public art festival, held in the Dutch town of Arnhem, started in 1949 as a celebration of rebirth after World War II. Credit Maurice Boyer
ARNHEM, The Netherlands — For his installation at this year’s Sonsbeek, a multidisciplinary public art exhibition in the Dutch city of Arnhem, Kevin van Braak built a woodworking shop and invited 25 other artists to make furniture and sculptures to be placed inside the city park.
For the wood, Mr. van Braak used the park’s own felled trees — a clever spin on reuse, one of the themes of the event.
There was only one problem: Because Sonsbeek park was once a site of the Battle of Arnhem, a key military conflict at the end of the Second World War, the wood was full of bullets and shrapnel.
“At the saw mill I broke two saw belts and one saw lost 12 teeth,” Mr. van Braak said, guiding a visitor through the woodworking shop in May.
The story of Mr. van Braak’s art project is emblematic of the larger narrative of Sonsbeek, which will run this year until Sept. 18.
The exhibition was initiated in 1949 by Arnhem’s leaders in an effort to rejuvenate the city, about an hour’s drive from Amsterdam, and to bring some of the joy back to its war-torn park.
The first edition of Sonsbeek featured more than 200 sculptures along the park’s pathways and was attended by more than 100,000 visitors. Many of the works tried, in one way or another, to process or commemorate the Netherlands’ traumatic wartime experience. Some sculptures from the first Sonsbeek — including “Phoenix,” a symbol for the city’s emergence from the ashes, by Ossip Zadkine — still stand in the park.
Alphons der Avest’s “Bakehouse” at Sonsbeek. The structure’s wood will eventually be fed into its oven. Credit Maurice Boyer
Sonsbeek started as a triennial, featuring new works by Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin. Later editions featured works by Lucio Fontana, Claes Oldenburg and Jenny Holzer.
In 1971, the exhibition expanded beyond the boundaries of the park and added public locations throughout the city, as well as the Museum Arnhem, a contemporary art museum, and the Kroller-Muller Museum in nearby Veluwe National Forest.
That same year, the organizational structure of Sonsbeek changed, so that the exhibition was driven by a single independent curator each time, who ran it for one year and then left. Curators mounted shows sporadically up until 2008, and then the event stopped for seven years.
“All the recent editions have been one-off productions, which would recur whenever we felt that the art or the society asks for it or demands it,” said Tati Vereecken-Suwarganda, the managing director of Sonsbeek. “It was one of our long wishes to build a structure to be able to recur every four years.”
Today a quarter of the festival’s budget of 2.3 million euros, or $2.6 million, comes from the city of Arnhem, and about half is from the independent Foundation for Art in the Public Domain. The rest is made up from regional government support and other sponsors.
This year’s Sonsbeek, with 45 artworks by artists from 22 countries in the world, is guest curated by the Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa, which chose as this year’s theme the concept of “transACTION.”
Members of Ruangrupa, a group of artists who are all concerned with urban spaces and social engagement, arrived in Arnhem in July 2015 and set up an open-door workshop called Ruru house, which allowed them to interact with people from the city and to get to know Arnhem better.
“We are trying to use it as a space for people to transact,” explained Ade Darmawan, a member of the collective. “We invite artists to create the space, rather than just to create objects.”
The Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa is guest-curating Sonsbeek this year on a theme of “transACTION.” Credit Maurice Boyer
The Sonsbeek board chose Ruangrupa because the 16-year old collective seemed to be primarily interested in artistic engagement with the community. “A lot of contemporary artists are dealing with issues in public domain that have to with the idea of rebuilding,” Ms. Vereecken-Suwarganda said. “They’re trying to perhaps find different perspectives on issues that are lacking, or need to be addressed, they can be social or socio-political. There’s definitely a demand for the artists to think about how to envision the future, and it has been our starting point.”
Entering Sonsbeek Park, past a little white windmill and restaurant with a paddling pool for children, the visitor comes upon a large wooden structure, by the artist Alphons der Avest, designed with patterns from five major world religions. Inside the structure, bakers from various backgrounds will make a range of goods — Turkish bread, Dutch rolls, Italian pizza — that are meant to be shared with the public. As time goes by, the wood that made the house will be fed into the oven, so the house will consume itself, Mr. Darmawan said.
Down the hill and along the stream, the Dutch artist Rob Voerman has created another house-like installation over and around an existing waterfall. The artist modeled the design on the idea of a bank, with an open foyer and high ceilings, to explore the notion of economic and natural transactions. From the outside it looks more like a Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid structure, with its glossy aluminum exterior and small, eye-like stained glass windows in the facade.
Other artists have chosen less trafficked areas of the park for more quiet contemplation. Shilpa Gupta, from Mumbai, has selected a clearing in the woods to create a space for meditation.
“We’ve got a bank, a church, a workshop and a playground,” said Mr. Darmawan, guiding a visitor through the park as works were still being built in mid-May. “The idea is to create a kind of city inside the city with new versions of institutional structures.”
After each past edition of Sonsbeek, the city would select works to remain on permanent display. “Lazy King,” a 2008 sculpture by the artist Alain Sechas, reclines on the lawn before Sonsbeek’s largest permanent monument, the Stadsvilla Sonsbeek, formerly a manor house in the park, and now a hotel and popular site for weddings.
Mr. van Braak welcomes artists into his woodworking workshop on the hill behind the Stadsvilla, where he will make his own piece for this year’s Sonsbeek. He has allowed the artists to do whatever they want with the bullet- and shrapnel-filled wood from the park’s trees, “but I did say it would be something nice if they could make something they could place in the park, so people could sit on it or use it somehow.”
In that way, he said, visitors could reflect on the past: “The whole history is inside already.”
A version of this special report appears in print on June 16, 2016, in The International New York Times. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Dutch City Makes the Most of Its Park, and Its History
By NINA SIEGALJUNE 16, 2016
“VVest Life,” a work in progress from KUNSTrePUBLIK, an artist collective based in Berlin, in Sonsbeek park. The public art festival, held in the Dutch town of Arnhem, started in 1949 as a celebration of rebirth after World War II. Credit Maurice Boyer
ARNHEM, The Netherlands — For his installation at this year’s Sonsbeek, a multidisciplinary public art exhibition in the Dutch city of Arnhem, Kevin van Braak built a woodworking shop and invited 25 other artists to make furniture and sculptures to be placed inside the city park.
For the wood, Mr. van Braak used the park’s own felled trees — a clever spin on reuse, one of the themes of the event.
There was only one problem: Because Sonsbeek park was once a site of the Battle of Arnhem, a key military conflict at the end of the Second World War, the wood was full of bullets and shrapnel.
“At the saw mill I broke two saw belts and one saw lost 12 teeth,” Mr. van Braak said, guiding a visitor through the woodworking shop in May.
The story of Mr. van Braak’s art project is emblematic of the larger narrative of Sonsbeek, which will run this year until Sept. 18.
The exhibition was initiated in 1949 by Arnhem’s leaders in an effort to rejuvenate the city, about an hour’s drive from Amsterdam, and to bring some of the joy back to its war-torn park.
The first edition of Sonsbeek featured more than 200 sculptures along the park’s pathways and was attended by more than 100,000 visitors. Many of the works tried, in one way or another, to process or commemorate the Netherlands’ traumatic wartime experience. Some sculptures from the first Sonsbeek — including “Phoenix,” a symbol for the city’s emergence from the ashes, by Ossip Zadkine — still stand in the park.
Alphons der Avest’s “Bakehouse” at Sonsbeek. The structure’s wood will eventually be fed into its oven. Credit Maurice Boyer
Sonsbeek started as a triennial, featuring new works by Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin. Later editions featured works by Lucio Fontana, Claes Oldenburg and Jenny Holzer.
In 1971, the exhibition expanded beyond the boundaries of the park and added public locations throughout the city, as well as the Museum Arnhem, a contemporary art museum, and the Kroller-Muller Museum in nearby Veluwe National Forest.
That same year, the organizational structure of Sonsbeek changed, so that the exhibition was driven by a single independent curator each time, who ran it for one year and then left. Curators mounted shows sporadically up until 2008, and then the event stopped for seven years.
“All the recent editions have been one-off productions, which would recur whenever we felt that the art or the society asks for it or demands it,” said Tati Vereecken-Suwarganda, the managing director of Sonsbeek. “It was one of our long wishes to build a structure to be able to recur every four years.”
Today a quarter of the festival’s budget of 2.3 million euros, or $2.6 million, comes from the city of Arnhem, and about half is from the independent Foundation for Art in the Public Domain. The rest is made up from regional government support and other sponsors.
This year’s Sonsbeek, with 45 artworks by artists from 22 countries in the world, is guest curated by the Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa, which chose as this year’s theme the concept of “transACTION.”
Members of Ruangrupa, a group of artists who are all concerned with urban spaces and social engagement, arrived in Arnhem in July 2015 and set up an open-door workshop called Ruru house, which allowed them to interact with people from the city and to get to know Arnhem better.
“We are trying to use it as a space for people to transact,” explained Ade Darmawan, a member of the collective. “We invite artists to create the space, rather than just to create objects.”
The Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa is guest-curating Sonsbeek this year on a theme of “transACTION.” Credit Maurice Boyer
The Sonsbeek board chose Ruangrupa because the 16-year old collective seemed to be primarily interested in artistic engagement with the community. “A lot of contemporary artists are dealing with issues in public domain that have to with the idea of rebuilding,” Ms. Vereecken-Suwarganda said. “They’re trying to perhaps find different perspectives on issues that are lacking, or need to be addressed, they can be social or socio-political. There’s definitely a demand for the artists to think about how to envision the future, and it has been our starting point.”
Entering Sonsbeek Park, past a little white windmill and restaurant with a paddling pool for children, the visitor comes upon a large wooden structure, by the artist Alphons der Avest, designed with patterns from five major world religions. Inside the structure, bakers from various backgrounds will make a range of goods — Turkish bread, Dutch rolls, Italian pizza — that are meant to be shared with the public. As time goes by, the wood that made the house will be fed into the oven, so the house will consume itself, Mr. Darmawan said.
Down the hill and along the stream, the Dutch artist Rob Voerman has created another house-like installation over and around an existing waterfall. The artist modeled the design on the idea of a bank, with an open foyer and high ceilings, to explore the notion of economic and natural transactions. From the outside it looks more like a Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid structure, with its glossy aluminum exterior and small, eye-like stained glass windows in the facade.
Other artists have chosen less trafficked areas of the park for more quiet contemplation. Shilpa Gupta, from Mumbai, has selected a clearing in the woods to create a space for meditation.
“We’ve got a bank, a church, a workshop and a playground,” said Mr. Darmawan, guiding a visitor through the park as works were still being built in mid-May. “The idea is to create a kind of city inside the city with new versions of institutional structures.”
After each past edition of Sonsbeek, the city would select works to remain on permanent display. “Lazy King,” a 2008 sculpture by the artist Alain Sechas, reclines on the lawn before Sonsbeek’s largest permanent monument, the Stadsvilla Sonsbeek, formerly a manor house in the park, and now a hotel and popular site for weddings.
Mr. van Braak welcomes artists into his woodworking workshop on the hill behind the Stadsvilla, where he will make his own piece for this year’s Sonsbeek. He has allowed the artists to do whatever they want with the bullet- and shrapnel-filled wood from the park’s trees, “but I did say it would be something nice if they could make something they could place in the park, so people could sit on it or use it somehow.”
In that way, he said, visitors could reflect on the past: “The whole history is inside already.”
A version of this special report appears in print on June 16, 2016, in The International New York Times. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe