Thirteen artists who graduated this year from different departments of the Royal Academy in The Hague (KABK) are exhibiting their work at Haagse Kunstkring (HKK).
They were free to make their own exhibition co-operatively and (as it looks like) in full respect for each other’s work.
It has become a well staged, even quite coherent show.
That in itself is quite surprising considering the very personal content of some the works.
The works on show vary from the relatively simple intervention by Maja Pop Trajkova, which creates, amongst others, a special space for Katarina Juričić’s work, to the sophisticated machinery by Louis Braddock Clarke of which, admittedly, i personally understand not even half, but which gives listening to the world quite another dimension.
Two artists are as lucky as to have a single space for their own.
Catherine Ostraya has the rarely used attic to show her performance (as i was a bit early only a countdown for the action was on show) and Linhuei Chen has the gallery’s kitchen and part of the staircase where she gives a compelling account of the constantly changing position of an artist and a mother raising a family in a foreign country.
Technically speaking the back space of the gallery is probably the most challenging as it contains more or less monumental and very different works by four artists.
There are the stereoscopic encounters with nature by Sophia Wester, the colourful altars for the feminine by Pien Kars, the omnipresence of the giant hogweed by Erik van Schaften and the cyanotypes (a technique which seems to gain popularity again amongst artists) of plastic waste from the sea by Suzette Bousema.
Of course all four works have something to do with nature and archaeology but still the results are quite distinct.
The combination is however quite successful.
One could even claim the works by both Filippo Maria Ciriani and Stella Hyunji Kim are about archaeology, the first photographing the small mining town of Kelmis in German speaking eastern Belgium (just south of Dutch Vaals) and its surroundings, a mining place where they are prospecting again for riches, and the latter looking for what seemingly destructive burning can in fact recreate out of what we once owned.
Both Huaxin Zhang and Moe Kim are trying to create a new kind of authenticity, Zhang extracting a kind of softness from local carpentry in textile, and Moe Kim in a more individual way with her familiarity with artificial light of the high tech world she is used to, processed in textile.
I didn’t visit the show with the intention to make a report about it, but the young artists made such a wonderful effort that i couldn’t resist showing you some aspects; if you want to see the real thing however, you have to hurry, as next Sunday is the last day of the show (it was opened yesterday).
© Villa Next Door 2019
Contents of all photographs courtesy to the artists and Haagse Kunstkring, Den Haag.
Bertus Pieters
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