MY Public Space / “… to find emptiness in cityscapes”
MY Public Space / "...to find emptiness in cityscapes" is an exhibition that offers a platform to artists whose work appropriates or scans the total emptiness of public spaces in such a way as to confer new meaning on the apparently ordinary. By doing so, it may inspire people to approach public (but nevertheless highly personal) space in a new – more personal, critical and creative – way.
After all, public space belongs to each one of us and that makes it a complex of individual experience and perception; in practice, however, we tend to perceive these shared transitional areas of our towns and cities as so impersonal and ordinary that we treat them with near-complete indifference. It is as if the outside world has nothing to do with us. This attitude provides no incentive to adopt an interactive and creative approach to our own personal ownership of (and interest in) the public domain.
Gemak’s first exhibition of 2010 provides a platform for artists who draw inspiration from what goes on in public space, whether in their immediate environment or in places far outside it. They draw attention to what seems empty, over-crowded, chaotic, uninteresting, unreadable or invisible. Appropriating the public domain above all as a private domain, they find inspiration for work that confers new meaning on apparently over-crowded / empty examples of the kind of urbanisation that sometimes make us blind and deaf to the everyday world of the towns and cities in which we live.
The artists invited to take part in this exhibition look at public space and record, accentuate and exaggerate what they find there; they zoom in, reflect on their findings, collect data from their real-life and virtual explorations, make sound recordings, measure the city for size, and produce notes and sketches. In short, they use public space as a logical extension of their own personal world. MY Public Space / "...to find emptiness in cityscapes" invites the public to consider this personal approach and experiment with it for themselves.
Artists: Willem Besselink, Justin Bennett, Roderik Henderson, Bart Lodewijks, Peter Luining, Monica Nouwens, Els Opsomer and Marike Schuurman.
This exhibition relates to the public space theme of the Design Den Haag event. Foundation Design The Hague investigates the relationship Design and Governance. For further information, please visit www.designdenhaag.eu
Monica Nouwens, Ossian (LA-series).