THE MUSEUM AS NETWORK
Our ambitions as a museum are not confined to within our walls but extend well beyond them. Besides our programmed exhibition, education and collection activities, we take part in external projects together with other institutes, initiatives and individuals. In effect, we form part of a national and international network of players in the contemporary art world.
Together with our partners in this network, we engage in projects – often long-term in character – aimed at raising understanding and provoking discussion of contemporary art in relation to the world at large.
RIWAQ 2009
NEW: Brian Holmes publicatie
Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society contains a selection of texts and essays by the writer Brian Holmes hat engage with the possibilities and problematics of geopolitics and geopoetics. Holmes is a crucial contemporary writer and thinker whose insight into current social and political developments and how they relate to artistic processes opens up a new field of “geocritique”. The examples he cites extend across Latin America, Europe and Asia, where he looks at networks, artworks, films, institutions and protest movements for signs of how future progressive strategies might be shaped. The texts here are connected in part with the long-term collaborative research project Continental Drift.
Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society is published by the Van Abbemuseum in collaboration with WHW, Zagreb, as the second publication in the Van Abbemuseum Public Research Series. This series is dedicated to putting new knowledge about the political possibilities of art and its institutions into the public domain. The museum collaborates with writers, curators, activists and other cultural organisations who share its ambitions to speculate on the possible social roles of art and its potential to help us imagine the world otherwise. The books are intended to serve as inspirational sources for future developments as well as a record of individual responses in the field of art.
Q&A Play Van Abbe
• Change Over periods?
• When do the Change Over periods take place?
• Why the title Play Van Abbe?
• Why the title Play Van Abbe? (take 2)
• Why these questions about Play Van Abbe now? Why not 10 years ago in the 20th century?
• If there's no role, would you close the doors?
• Does the museum become a children's playground too?
• What do you think of the exhibition of the former director Rudi Fuchs?
• What happened in 1989?
• Do YOU understand all the artists?
• Why do artists make video and other stuff?
• Why do you have texts on the wall? Why did you invite Nedko Solakov?
• Why do you show work of Dan Flavin in combination with a series of portraits?
• What could art mean for technology?
• What is the meaning of art?
• What is fun about the Van Abbemuseum?
• Why is it so difficult?
• Invite to Q&A Play Van Abbe - Charles Esche
