Exhibitions are open from June 18th till September 17th.
Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen presents the exhibition Joeri Woudstra – Millennial Gravestone Quotes. In his first solo Joeri Woudstra (NL, 1993) explores the influence of technological developments and contemporary advertising culture on feelings of nostalgia. The exhibition reflects on our changing perception of time.
Joeri Woudstra might be the characteristic “millennial”: an energetic allrounder, both creatively and technically skilled, never found in one place at a time, and proficient with both music and image. In the metal “Genieloods” shed of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, he investigates a dominant awareness in peers born in the 1980s and 1990s: the continuous feeling of nostalgia.
The artist has graduated in 2016 from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. The past year he worked mostly in the fields of music, collectives, and events. Now, in this exhibition, the object (or product) is the starting point. Both inspiration and scenery is the artificial environment of the Kunstfort; where real and fake, image and nature, past and future, come together in a fascinating symbiosis.
Tuesday 11 July 19.30
Millennial Nostalgia: Public evening with Kevin Bray, Shane Burmania, Olga Kortz, Kareem Lotfy, Alma Mathijssen, Tycho Posthumus, Joeri Woudstra, Zippora Elders
RSVP here
Raymond Barion—Parallel Perspectives. This overview of the Belgian-Dutch artist Raymond Barion (Valkenburg, 1946) shows paintings, drawings, studies and sculptural objects. Barion’s desolate landscapes, with distinctive elements of neon and architecture, date back to the 1980s. With their abandoned machineries, mythical sceneries and alternative visions of the future they can be seen as a prediction of today’s unrest.
Barion’s work is magical, precise and sensitive—an endless dreaming in isometric perspectives. This makes his paintings both timeless and topical: the artist shows a world in which nature is displaced by the military, as is precisely the case in the artificial surroundings of the Kunstfort. The combination of skilled drawing techniques with sublime landscape painting is astonishing.
Raymond Barion studied in Belgium and has lived there for most of his life. He is an intellectual and theorist who takes his time—sometimes even decades—to finish his works. Barion commuted between his home in Antwerp to the St. Joost Acadamy in Breda for years, to teach generations of now established artists. His own work has been discovered only recently, and is since appreciated internationally.
Tuesday 12 September:
Public lecture by Raymond Barion and conversation with ex-students Henri Jacobs and Jan van de Pavert
RSVP here
Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen is art, heritage and nature in one.
The monumental Fort bij Vijfhuizen is one of the first concrete buildings in the Netherlands and part of the Defence Line of Amsterdam; a large-scale 19th-century defensive plan that was never completely put into action, and has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. The island is surrounded by distinct examples of Dutch country planning like the 19th century polder landscapes and 20th century suburban “Vinex” housing districts.
Since 2005 the island is a destination for art, a unique location where visual art and military heritage come together. The exhibitions mirror the fort’s surroundings: a collage of engineered landscapes showcasing the deployment of nature for a wide range of—now often outmoded—purposes.
The Kunstfort is a place where time, space, and image merge. The artistic program is inspired by the genre of science fiction—artists create alternative realities and question existing societal systems. Recurring themes are climate and landscape, border politics and defense models, technology and ritual, dystopia and apocalypse. The outcomes are presented in exhibitions, outdoor interventions, and multidisciplinary exchanges.