An artist collaboration
Last friday EX-MÊKH organised it’s summer-BBQ on a beautiful summer evening. Plans for our coming exhibition at Platforms Project in Athens were elaborated and we start to realise that EX-MÊKH exists almost 20 years. We stayed out very late with a rather moderate but excellent meal and lots of wine!
For 2024 EX-MÊKH decided to also take part in Platforms Project 2024 in Athens (GR). The whole set up of this fair for independant art platforms and exhibition spaces has changed. From now on it will be multi-disciplinary including theatre, music and dance. The venue, which used to be at the Art School of Athens, has also changed to Keramikos if I understand well. This is an interesting change to us so we applied and we were accepted. The organisation asked us for a picture to put iwn the catalogue. We talked about our intentions for this occasion and we unaminously chose for an installation build by the three of us. We decided to make a work together in one of our studio’s. You can see the result underneath. It is based on the idea of idea’s, objects, text, and image washing up at a beach to inspire unexpected connections. It depicts an organic image of what EX-MÊKH is.
EX-MÊKH finished their exhibition at the Hybrid Art Fair 2024 with satisfaction. We were excited about the reception of our work and the way we presented it was very much appreciated. You can see pictures of the exhibition here! We met a lot of interesting people, some of whom were interested in presenting our work in Magazines or in galleries in Menorca or Las Palmas. We will see where that will lead us.
Our stay in Madrid was very inspiring. We visited several exhibitions: Ulla von Brandenburg in the Palacio de Vélazquez, The Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, The Prado again, Kees visited ARCO 2024 and the three of us visited the Reina Sofia Museum with a surprisingly interesting exhibition of Carlos Saura (post will soon follow in the blog). It was a very intense and awarding week!
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 this form of EX-MÊKH publicity has been designed by our secret EX-MÊKH participant Ben Faydherbe.
Our third member Maarten Schepers is also very busy in his studio preparing for the Hybrid Art Fair 2024. Continuïng on his research in Spain he shows the following works in progress:
Ellen Rodenberg is continuïng her research on Inner Landscapes for the Hybrid Art Fair 2024:
EX-MÊKH is preparing for the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid and experimenting with their materials. In this second teaser some try-outs by Ellen Rodenberg , processing the ideas she developed at Arteventura during a residency in Spain:
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.
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:
Platforms Project will take place from October 13 to October 16, 2022. Information on visits can be found here!
Another try-out in the woodshedding area we use for the Platforms Project 2022 project:
