Apart from being an independent curator, (for a list of exhibitions I have curated, click hereLoading …) currently I’m involved as (co)founder of Radical Reversibility, a practice and research-based art cooperative founded by three artists and myself.
RR operates within the context of contemporary art, taking lens-based media as a point of departure. The cooperative aims to investigate and develop visual and conceptual strategies that radically reverse the paradigms of our current visual culture.
RR focuses on ‘research through images’ – from the perspectives of both makers and viewers. Our common field of interest consists of the fundamental entanglement between image and gaze. We aim to uncover different ’cultures of the gaze’ in order to playfully challenge and decondition our looking habits. By showing what alternative visual approaches look like, looked like and will look like, we wish to construct transhistorical frames of reference.
RR seeks to open dialogues between different traditions of image-making. Therefore we will enquire into non-Western viewpoints in search of new insights and unexpected intercultural cross-references. Subsequently, imbued with a non-anthropocentric mindset we set out to re-examine predominant habits of thinking and looking.
RR seeks for interdisciplinary collaborations with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how images come about and what images (can) do. The RR cooperative encourages visual artists and researchers – including philosophers, historians, scientists and writers – to exchange ideas, to compare individual findings and to cross-pollinate one another’s work.
RR envisions new horizons, alternative perspectives and different concepts toward a fundamental transformation of our gaze.
From 1998 – 2008 I was the curator of the independent and ongoing art program The Past in the PresentLoading …, which consisted of exhibitions, publications, lectures & debates, and commissioned work, and was also part of a photography curriculum in a master’s degree course.
The Past in the Present questioned the way in which the representation of the past is constructed and set out actively to devise innovative challenges to prevailing historical narratives. It started out as an annual lecture series, launched in 1999 by the Netherlands Photo Archives, Rotterdam (formerly known as NFA, now part of the Netherlands Photography Museum). Its initial aim was primarily to foster discussion about the meaning of archival images and found footage within a variety of art forms. Over the years, however, the emphasis has shifted from the reuse of historical images to questioning all representations of reality and problematizing any received view on history.