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. In it is 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. This space used to be a display case on the front of a café, De Schouw. This place 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! In this book book all the exhibitions and artists are shown. Also documented are the 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 also 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, responsible for the design of our publicity. An overpaint-painting of EX-MÊKH member Kees Koomen can also be found in the book. It’s graphic Design of bureau 75B is rather special for a relatively small book with no less than 1150 pages. The bureau developed it 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!

Con alma – evaluation

To accompany the exhibition we asked Ben Faydherbe to make a small booklet with the work of all three of us. Our secret member did great and the booklets we took were gone before the end of the fair! We are getting a nice set of little booklets.

The cover of this small publication

Back in Holland after a satisfying presentation by EX-MÊKH at the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid life continues. In between other projects Kees wrote some reports about Madrid. On chmkoome’s blog he published daily reports. He also wrote a report on ARCO on the Art-site for Den Haag Jegens & Tevens . You can find EX-MÊKH’s exhibition at the Hybrid Art Fair on the EX-MÊKH site under exhibitions.

Reporters mentioned Con Alma in reports in on-line magazines ( Liceo Magazine for instance) and lots of pictures of our work showed on social media. 

Con Alma

Today we discovered a post of the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid which will start in three weeks. It is coming near and we look forward to visiting the other fairs in the Madrid Art Week: ARCO, JUST MAD-Art Fair, Drawing Room and Art Madrid.
The title of EX-MÊKH’s exhibition will be Con Alma. We take the soul of the collaboration of Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers and me into the hotel room of the Petit Palace Hotel. We change this room into a mirror for our public to reflect on!

Hybrid Art Fair

Hybrid Art Fair

EX-MÊKH will participate in the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid from Februari 24 to 27. The fair is held in a hotel in the centre of the city and participants are expected to exhibit in hotelrooms. We will present work under the name Con alma trying to give the neutral and functional hotelroom a soul, the soul of EX-MÊKH!
In the mean while publicity for participants is starting as you can see on this page!

www.ex-mekh.nl

EX-MÊKH: Heidedagen – 2021

EX-MÊKH has been working on a new site and after having great holidays in which we did some “woodshedding’ on the Veluwe we put the site on-line yesterday. All the exhibitions since 2014 are on the “exhibitions”-page, we will continue to work to get the exhibitions from 2006 onwards on the site.