de Rijke/de Rooij mingle images and composition principles from painting history, and also from cinema and video, with pictorial worlds from the commercial image industry, and formal-aesthetic elements of contemporary art. Their films are shot using professional film industry resources. They are not shown in the cinema, but exclusively in art venues. Here the artists insist on the best possible cinema setting, controlling the way their works are perceived down to the last pictorial, sound or installative detail.
Jeroen de Rijke (b. 1970) and Willem de Rooij (b. 1969) have worked together
since 1994. Their work revolves around questions of representation relating
to artistic and media images, cultural-historical artefacts and
socio-political forms. The two artists produce films and photographs, using
the "beauty" of familiar compositional and formal principles and the
tempting projection surface this provides for us. de Rijke/de Rooij's images
are always disturbing because they usually concentrate on a single take,
action or object; reduced image distillations intensify doubts over "the
image", initiating a discourse about our culturally driven readings of
phenomena, about how we use images and how they affect us.
de Rijke/de Rooij mingle images and composition principles from painting
history, and also from cinema and video, with pictorial worlds from the
commercial image industry, and formal-aesthetic elements of contemporary
art. Their films are shot using professional film industry resources. They
are not shown in the cinema, but exclusively in art venues. Here the artists
insist on the best possible cinema setting, controlling the way their works
are perceived down to the last pictorial, sound or installative detail. The
exhibition space is treated like a sculpture, defined by the technical
apparatus and the seating, a hybrid space somewhere between a cinema and an
exhibition; it is present as a minimal sculpture, even when the film is not
being shown. The artists also structure the audience's experience of time,
choosing to avoid the endless loops generally used for exhibitions, with
their associated arbitrary availability of the images/films for the public:
performances take place at precisely stated times, or by request. But de
Rijke/de Rooij are not interested in the cinema's traditional narrative
forms: in fact they make the qualities of cinema and film available as
moving image aggregates: experience of space and time, dialogues, sound,
light, focus are "performers" in their own right and develop their own
qualities in parallel. Often slowness is a key feature of their films. It
reinforces something that is essential to the artist's work, which would not
be possible without it: slowly revealing the ambivalence of an image, a
scene, of something presented. So their films often start as an abstract or
darkened image, which gradually turns out in the film's own time to be an
object, a condition.
The hybrid manifestations of our present are central to the artists'
content, transforming their abstract, beautiful works into socio-political
pieces, as they convey culturally different identities and realities. As
residents in a former colonial state, de Rijke/de Rooij experience the
cultural adaptation phenomena and problems as powerful identity generators;
as cosmopolitan citizens they experience them as a globalized theme for
living together in an age of migration and hybridized cultural identity.
Here de Rijke / de Rooij address what is one's "own" and what is "alien" as
a refinement of the differences that demand more intensive attention to
difference as such. Thus for example an early work called 'Of Three Men'
(1998) shows the interior of a Neo-Romanesque church in Amsterdam that is
now used as a mosque.
Picture details and camera angles are reminiscent of church interiors by the
painter Pieter Saenredam. Elements of the action include changing light, a
low-hanging chandelier circling slowly and rare movements by three men
sitting on the floor. Or 'Bantar Gebang' (2000): a single long-shot take in
the transfigured pictorial manner of Pieter Breughel the Elder shows
daybreak in a slum outside Jakarta; the image becomes increasingly dubious.
The familiarity of the pictorial and compositional references - and the
beauty of the compositions - are always over-determined in the artists' work
and tip representation into critical presence: flowers, ideal love, the
cinema, the central-perspective long shot, the numinous quality of a
landscape/of nature, the representation of non-commensurate social realities
come into conflict with the images of their representation.
The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Zürich brings together works from the last
two years, with two bouquets of flowers, a 35 mm film, photographs of
selected oriental carpets and a group of abstract 16 mm films. 'Bouquet II'
(2003) is based on press photographs that appeared in 2002 relating to the
sentence to death by stoning passed on the Muslim "adulteress" Amina Lawal
in March 2002 and the Miss World 2002 performances, which were rendered
impossible by numerous riots and victims. Furthermore, principal performers
were Miss World 2002, who was born in Holland, and the Nigerian Miss World
2001, Abgani Darego; Isioma Daniels, a Christian Nigerian who grew up in
Britain, who had a Fatwa issued against her because of her articles, and
Somalian born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticism of left-wing integration
models and membership of a conservative right-wing party led to the reproach
of betraying left-wing interpretation models, which she was expected to
accept unquestioningly as an emigrant, and finally led to exile in America.
Elements from the press photographs are "interpreted" as floral compositions
- we are confronted with an "impure" (and transient) natural beauty.
Using scientific apparatus and an abstract experimental film approach,
'Crystals I Â IX' (2003) showed the crystallization processes of substances
like plant fertilizer, vitamin C or cobalt chloride. Organic forms come
together as abstract images, scientific and art models, natural forms and
art forms hybridize.
'The Point of Departure' (2002) approaches its subject, a carpet, via light
reflections, organic-abstract forms, landscapes of fluff and threads; it
rushes through psychedelic light formations and glides slowly along
floral-abstract patterns. Can a carpet be read like a text? Are we moving
through accessible symbols of oriental culture or pure ornament? de Rijke /
de Rooij dispatch us on a journey from the abstract via the representational
into the universe: at the end of the film the carpet disappears into the
infinitely silent reaches of black space - the film mutates to the starry
science fiction scene of Stanley Kubrick's '2001. A Space Odyssey'.
de Rijke / de Rooij's "beautiful" images in the exhibition are often
refracted by "alien influences". They create a discourse about our ideas of
abstraction and representation, ornament and symbol, cliché and undefined
meaning, of refractions in sensing and understanding in terms of time and
cultural history.
KUNSTHALLE ZÃœRICH, 15 NOVEMBER TO 11 JANUARY 2004
PRESS CONFERENCE: FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER, 10.30 A.M.
OPENING: FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER, FROM 6 P.M.
EVENTS / DATES
Discussion / Film programme / Apértif: Sunday, 11 January 2004
11.30 a.m.: Jeroen de Rijke, Willem de Rooij, Florian Pumhösl and Beatrix
Ruf discuss the films of de Rijke / de Rooij
12.30 p.m.: Apéritif and book launch
2.00 p.m.: Film programme. Florian Pumhösl presents his selection of
abstract and scientific films.
Yoga classes in the Kunsthalle Zürich, in the migros museum für
gegenwartskunst and in the Galerie Eva Presenhuber: 6 January  10 January
2004
Benita-Immanuel Grosser has been looking at the possibilities, philosophy
and practice of building yoga into the art context and transferring it to
the architectural and socially coded situation of exhibition venues since
1994. This conceptual practice led to the long-term project "participating,
at the same time", during which public yoga sessions took place in various
international art situations. In July 2001, Benita-Immanuel Grosser founded
the Y8/International Sivananda Yogacenter in Hamburg, which now regularly
discusses art in the context of yoga at regular intervals.
Catalog: The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue on the work of de
Rijke / de Rooij with numerous illustrations and essays by writers
including: David Bussel, Sven Lütticken, Onno Ydema, Beatrix Ruf, Jan
Verwoert. Publ. by Kunsthalle Zürich, to appear in January 2004
Edition: de Rijke / de Rooij will be realizing a special edition themselves
for the Kunsthalle Zürich in a small, limited run. Information from 01 272
15 15.
Public guided tours: Thursdays at 6 p.m., with Medea Hoch: 20.11. / 4.12. /
18.12. / 8.1.2004
Opening times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 12 a.m. Â 6 p.m., Saturday, Sunday
11 a.m. Â 5 p.m., closed Monday. Thursday 12 Â 8 p.m.
HOLIDAYS: 24.12. / 2.1.04: 11 a.m. Â 5 p.m. CLOSED: 25.12. / 26.12. / 31.12.
/ 1.1.04
Our programm of public lectures and additional events is supported by Swiss
Re
For support of the exhibition de Riijke/de Rooij the Kunsthalle Zürich
thanks Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Mondriaan Foundation,
Amsterdam, BLUMENHALLE
In the image:de Rijke / de Rooij - I'm Coming Home in Forty Days, 1997.
Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005
Zurich