Publicity

Coming weekend EX-MÊKH will leave for Madrid to take part in the Hybrid Art Fair. Yesterday our new folders and a booklet in our growing series of EX-MÊKH printwork arrived. As usual it has been designed by our sectret EX-MÊKH participant Ben Faydherbe.

A folder and the booklet
The EX-MÊKH Collection

EX-MÊKH Goes Madrid!

From 7 to 10 March 2024 EX-MÊKH will again participate in the Hybrid Art Fair. The fair is located in the Hotel Petit Palace in which the rooms will be exhibition-spaces. During the fair participants can also stay in these rooms which poses questions about art and privacy, the nature of artworks and the nature of hotelrooms. We will try to show relevant works for all these questions, processing our experience with Spanish culture and with working in Spain. It will be a challenge to continue finding appropriate images for these subjects as we tried to do in the 2022 edition of the Hybrid Artfair with the installation Con Alma.

Maarten Schepers and Ellen Rodenberg will benefit from their residency in Arteventura past fall. Kees Koomen has traveled extensively in Spain and enjoys classical and modern Spanish literature and cinematography immensely.

Het Grote Aanschouwboek

The cover of the book
Brickstone account
Page of Maarten Schepers in change #754

On saturday December 2 Het Grote Aanschouwboek (The Big Aanschouwbook) was presented, a survey of 22 years of De Aanschouw in the Witte de Withstreet in Rotterdam. De Aanschouw is the smallest art gallery in Rotterdam and in The Netherlands if I am not mistaken. It used to be a display case on the front of a café, De Schouw, which was situated opposite the building in which De Rotterdamse Courant had it’s offices. As soon as the newspaper went to the printer it was put in the display case and the editors went to De Schouw to have a beer and to discuss the contents of the new edition.

The presentation of Het Grote Aanschouwboek took place in a well filled auditorium in TENT, you can see an account of the happening here! The book shows all the exhibitions and artists, weekly changes and the Overschilderschilderijen (overpaintpaintings) of which documentation is still available. We are happy to say that very few is missing. Edo Dijksterhuis wrote a history of De Aanschouw and collected anecdotes can be found in the back of the book. The participation of EX-MÊKH can be found in it, including a poster of underground member Ben Faydherbe who is responsible for the design of our publicity. An overpaint-painting of EX-MÊKH member Kees Koomen can also be found in the book. The graphic Design of bureau 75B is special for a relatively small book with no less than 1150 pages. It developed into a brickstone-account of a period of art and friendship!

Platforms Project 2022

For the on-line edition of Platforms Project in 2021 EX-MÊKH produced the video Stage Arousal. In this video we built a white fair-booth in which we created an installation in the way we usually work. Some actions performed by the members of EX-MÊKH were part of this video. Evaluating, Stage Arousal surprised us with the theatrical aspects of working in such a booth.

The coming edition of Platforms Project 2022 in Athens (GR) EX-MÊKH shows a video we worked on in the Veluwe National Park in the east of The Netherlands. Making this video we did research to find possibilities for another installation to build in the exhibition hall of the fair. We decided to move the white cube in which we usually present our work into the forest. By this decision the white cube became a wooden cube and the back wall became open so that the natural surroundings were our backdrop. A surprise was that the booth we built in nature became a sculpture in itself in which our work plays it’s part. This video we will now show in Athens, Scenes from a Wormhole, will be a rough cut on the basis of which we build an installation around the video in our booth in Platforms Project. Later Platforms Project will put it on-line. Here are some stills to get an impression:

Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing in)
Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing out)
Kees Koomen: Janus
Maarten Schepers: No Title
Ellen Rodenberg: The Actors Are leaving

Platforms Project will take place from October 13 to October 16, 2022. Information on visits can be found here!