studio Claus Wiersma

Eye Filmmuseum presents a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Janis Rafa.
Rafa’s visual language is filmic and seductive. Yet her work is disquieting: it prompts the viewer to consider pressing questions, such as how humans relate to one another and to the world around them. Her latest works – which premieres at Eye – focus on the tension between care for and exploitation of animals and landscapes, through human inventions and desires.

‘KISS MY SOUL – Heavenly & Earthly Love in Contemporary Art’, at the Dordrechts Museum is an exhibition about the representation of love today. More than 75 works by 30 artists provide an overview of visual art in the 21st century, exuberant and with a warm beating heart.
From body lust to motherly love, from heartbreak to parental love, from brotherly love to love grief. This group exhibition features a mix of internationally renowned artists such as Marlene Dumas and Tracey Emin, alongside emerging talent such as Tanja Ritterbex and Charlott Weise. (copywright Dordrechts Museum)

This permanent exhibition is an expansion of Museum Rotterdam ’40-’45 NU.
14 May 1940, marked a traumatic breaking point in the story of Rotterdam. Bombing, fire, and rubble clearance destroyed a large portion of its built history. During reconstruction, the focus was on turning Rotterdam into a thoroughly modern metropolis.
In this exhibition Rotterdam before May 1940 comes to life in photos, film footage and historical architectural models.

This exhibition is a journey through a selection of works from Fiona Tan’s oeuvre, in which the passing of time and the role of the landscape as a mental space are recurring themes.
The exhibition focuses on Gray Glass (2020) and Inventory (2012), and the new work Footsteps (2022), which Fiona Tan made at the invitation of Eye. These video installations explore the connections between landscape, environment and humankind, and also the relationships between image, maker and viewer.
For Tan, time is both a medium and a vehicle. It is a material that she studies, shapes and processes into artworks – often in combination with still and moving images.

Collecting art can be a life-enhancing experience, especially when you surround yourself with it at home. This is demonstrated by the exhibition ‘Home is where the Art is’. At the Kunsthal, the collectors Johan Poort and Manon Visser invite the public to step into their home, as it were – the place where they live amidst their joint art collection. Different movements, periods, and both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art all meet and interact with each other in this diverse and intuitively shaped collection. In an intimate, homely setting the public will be able to discover associative, unexpected connections between a wide variety of artworks that clearly show Poort and Visser’s love of collecting.

The exhibition’Magnetic North’focuses on the Canadian modernist paintings of artists around the Group of Seven, an artist’s collective that is still immensely popular in Canada. Over eighty masterful paintings and sketches show a mythical, imaginary Canada. At the heart of the exhibition, audio-visual works by artist Caroline Monnet and filmmaker Lisa Jackson, open up a critical perspective on the paintings. These films by women who are rooted in cultures of the Indigenous peoples of these territories enable us to look at the landscapes by the Group of Seven in a different way.

Solo exhibition of Hella Jongerius’s work in GropiusBau, Berlin.
Entitled ‘Woven Cosmos’, the exhibition uses interactive elements to engage visitors in the artist’s open-ended, process-oriented techniques, encouraging a critical examination of issues around production and sustainability, present and future. Apart from Jongerius’s research into innovation and her progressive experimental practices, the exhibition highlights her ongoing enquiry into how we relate to objects. Jongeriuslab’s production will continue every day throughout the exhibition, allowing a number of works to evolve during the show.

The exhibition ‘We Are Animals’ in the Kunsthal brings together a great variety of extraordinary animal creations by over thirty contemporary artists. Works by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Candida Höfer, Paul McCarthy, and David Shrigley show the relationship between human beings and animals, and reveal how we, as humans, see and try to understand ourselves better through animals.
‘We are Animals’ explores different aspects of the relationship between humans and animals. The works either express edgy perspectives on how humans manipulate other animal species, or celebrate and appreciate animals for being the miraculous creatures that we can recognise so much of ourselves in.

Sculptures of feathered polar bears, installations with wild wolves, monumental paintings of cuddly cats, and poignant photographs of zoos: this provocative selection of works has resulted in an exciting exhibition that offers food for thought.

For this exhibition that marks the 75th anniversary of the Filmmuseum and the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Eye and the IFFR have selected five film directors from five continents as a way of celebrating the unlimited power and diversity of world cinema.
The filmmakers — Lucrecia Martel (South America), Nanouk Leopold (Europe), Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (Africa), Carlos Reygadas (North America) and Jia Zhang-ke (Asia) — were invited to make a work for the exhibition that exploits the three-dimensional gallery space rather than the two-dimensional cinema screen. For some of them, it was the first time they had created a cinematographic installation that explores the boundaries of their work and of the art of film in general.

The worlds of visual art and pop music come together at the Kunsthal Rotterdam. From A$AP Rocky, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears to Joy Division, Euromasters and The Beatles: this is the music that inspired the art in the exhibition ‘Black Album / White Cube’. Thirty five internationally renowned artists show works that have been significantly influenced by music. Over two hundred contemporary artworks have been brought together in the exhibition, including photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans and Anton Corbijn, video installations by Cyprien Gaillard and Arthur Jafa, and paintings by Albert Oehlen and Emil Schult. Divided into chapters such as ‘remixing and sampling’ or ‘original and copy’, the exhibition features countless exciting cross-overs.(copywright KunstHal)

‘Masterly!’ presents a grand retrospective of four centuries of paintings and drawings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection. It features work by famous masters such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Gogh, Delacroix, Pissarro, Saenredam, Goltzius and Basquiat. The exhibition highlights the special relationship between drawing and painting and reveals the great masters’ love of drawing.

‘Masterly!’ is part of Boijmans Next Door, a city-wide project to keep the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen visible during its renovation.

Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes (1937-1967) is known for his erotic photographic portraits in coarse-grained black and white. The exhibition ‘Ecstasy’ presents his work in over sixty unique vintage prints. Also shown are books, the original sketch pages for his unpublished Diary of an Erotomaniac, as well as one of his ‘photo films’.

The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm presents Hella Jongerius’s exhibition ‘Breathing Colour’, a visual installation that features the results of her longstanding research into colour, shape, light and materials.

On the borderline between art and design, it presents a visual examination of how colour and light interplay and change during all hours of the day. In forms of paper, textiles, ceramics, metal and plastics, designer Hella Jongerius displays her many years of artistic research into colour, light and materiality. Her study is deepened in the meeting of the works of art she has chosen from Nationalmuseum’s collections.

With associative films rich in imagery, such as Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1974) and especially Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky (1932‒1986) made his name as a leading innovator of the language of cinema.  Eye presents an exhibition devoted to the celebrated filmmaker and mystic, focusing specifically on Tarkovsky’s quest for existential truth. In addition to immersing the visitor in Tarkovsky’s imagery, the exhibition includes unique documents — letters, photos and Polaroids — that have never previously been displayed in the Netherlands.

Throughout summer 2019, Lafayette Anticipations invites the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius. She uses the building’s performative qualities to transform the interior space into a vast, constantly shifting loom; a giant textile studio, open to the public.
Interlace exposes the viewing public to the textile production process in order to create awareness, re-valuation and appreciation for textiles. It shows what consumers don’t usually see: the research and experimentation, the tools and materials, the trial and error that are as important as the result itself.
Throughout the three months of the exhibition, the public will be able to see new textile pieces being woven in the gallery space.

This exhibition showed the ten ‘Drawings for Projection’, that South African artist William Kentridge donated to the Eye Filmmuseum in 2015. These ten short animation films, that were made in between 1989 and 2011, marked Kentridge’s breakthrough on the international art scene. Also included in the exhibition was the film installation O Sentimental Machine (2015), featuring historical footage of Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky. The exhibition took place during the Holland Festival, for which William Kentridge was Associate Artist.The exhibition also featured a number of large wall tapestries that Kentridge produced at a local weaving mill in Johannesburg.

The Kunsthal is presenting over seventy large-format prints by Piranesi from the impressive graphic art collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. As an artist, Piranesi became known in the eighteenth century for his ‘Vedute di Roma’, an extensive series of etchings of impressive views of the ruins and monuments of Rome. In his famous series of prints featuring imaginary prisons, the ‘Carceri d’Invenzione’, Piranesi – who was originally an architect – expressed his spatial fantasies. Prints of rare quality are shown from both these series, as well as eight colossal books that highlight the dizzying imagination of Piranesi – as an artist, researcher and designer. This exhibition is part of a series of three exhibitions at the Kunsthal in the context of the city-wide project ‘Boijmans Next Door’.

Drawing on 15 years of colour research, designer Hella Jongerius presents a series of installations that deepen our understanding of colour. She has created a collection of specially designed objects that demonstrate how the experience of colour and form is affected by changing daylight throughout the day. In addition Hella Jongerius has selected together with artist Mathieu Meijers artworks from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The exhibition questions our perception of colour and reflects upon the history of colour research. Hella Jongerius: Breathing Colour is a statement about the strength, imperfection and versatility of colour as a reaction to the flatness of the colours produced by industry. Ultimately, Jongerius aims to pit the power of colour against the power of form.

Eye Filmmuseum presents the exhibition Jan Švankmajer – The Alchemical Wedding devoted to the work of Czech surrealist and master animator.
This is the first major retrospective of his bizarre and dark films and sculptures in the Netherlands. The exhibition at Eye features one big installation in which numerous short films by Švankmajer are screened amidst remarkable sculptures and ‘spirited’ images, together with three Wunderkammers filled with collages, tactile objects, sick maps and ‘medium’ drawings.

For Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) graphic art was a medium he could experiment with to his heart’s content. Picasso produced over 2,500 prints in a great variety of techniques. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has nearly four hundred of these prints in its collection, a selection of more than seventy of which will now be shown at the Kunsthal. Some of the highlights in the exhibition ‘Picasso on paper’ include the colour linocut prints depicting still lifes, bull fights, scenes from mythology and especially women. Picasso taught himself the technique of the colour linocut in 1958, when he was already well into his seventies. This exhibition also marks the start of ‘Boijmans Next Door’, a collaboration between a number of Rotterdam museums to keep part of the Boijmans collection visible in the city over the coming years.

Truth, facts, memories, reality: are they all constructions? The artists Broomberg & Chanarin, Omer Fast, Chia-Wei Hsu and Meiro Koizumi deploy not only film and video but also slide projections, photographs and sound to investigate and ‘unmask’ the past.
Reportage, re-enactment, documentary and filmic techniques are some of the strategies that these artists apply to expose the subjectivity of historical sources and the limitations of memory. In stories set in various places around the world, they investigate the construction of narratives and the manner in which stories change when told and retold from different perspectives.

The works on display shed light on the history of conflict zones, those places in the world where truth and fiction are brought into sharp focus. Broomberg & Chanarin, Omer Fast, Chia-Wei Hsu and Meiro Koizumi look at the representation of war. Can a war be recounted? Is it possible to depict a war? And what is the role of the artist in this regard? These questions act as catalysts for various stories, many of them unknown or forgotten, events that happened in World War II and the Cold War, as well as more recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A continuation of the manifesto Beyond the New, A Search for Ideals in Design, launched during the 2015 Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan. Various installations invite the visitors to reflect on how different contexts affect the appreciation of functional things. The exhibition raises questions on the gap between how we experience design in daily life and how we read the meaning and value of those objects in the context of a museum display.

The Coolsingel, Rotterdams’ main avenue, went through many transformations; from medieaval canal to the traffic artery and shopping street it is today. The exhibition ‘Coolsingel’ takes the visitors on a tour of its architectural, political and emotional history.

This first exhibition devoted entirely to Scorsese illuminates his work and life. A number of key film fragments are projected on large screens in the exhibition. Accompanying these are over 400 objects and documents taken from the personal collections of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

Dutch product designer Hella Jongerius and design theorist Louise Schouwenberg have been invited to develop a site-specific installation for the Paternoster Hall at Pinakothek der Moderne.

Hella Jongerius has made a name for herself with her very specific way of combining craftsmanship and industrial manufacturing. Her furniture, textile and ceramic designs are meant as a symbiosis of high and low-tech, of past and present, of traditional and innovative materials.
In her research, Louise Schouwenberg, head of the department of contextual design at the renowned Design Academy in Eindhoven, mainly focuses on the interface between art and design.

Together with Louise Schouwenberg in 2015 Hella Jongerius authored the “Beyond the New. A Search for Ideals in Design” manifesto. It opposes an industry that believes the sole goals of production are the idea of the “new” and commercial success. They contrast this to the conviction that industry first taps the potential of current manufacturing opportunities when it tackles new challenges that address high quality, sustainable products and also foster design that can be free and experimental.

This exhibition shows a unique selection of three-dimensional works by all important hyperrealist sculptors of the past 50 years. From the early American pioneers, including George Segal, Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea, to the rise of the international movement, represented by Juan Muñoz (Spain), Maurizio Cattelan (Italy), Berlinde de Bruyckere (Belgium) and Ron Mueck, Sam Jinks and Patricia Piccinini (Australia).

Exhibitiondesign for ‘Breathing Colour’ by Hella Jongerius in the Design Museum in London. This exhibition focuses on the longlasting colour research by Jongerius, and how this research materialises in her textile- and productdesign.

The group exhibition Close-Up – A New Generation of Film and Video Artists in the Netherlands, featured numerous recent film and video works and spatial installations by a new generation of filmmakers and artists in the Netherlands, who are breaking down the barriers between film, video and visual art. The participating artists were: Melanie Bonajo, Felix Burger, Helen Dowling, Zachary Formwalt, Mariska de Groot, Hamza Halloubi, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña, Amos Mulder, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Janis Rafa, belit sağ, Joris Strijbos & Matthijs Munnik, Lichun Tseng and David Verbeek.
The exhibition at EYE offered an impression of the broad spectrum of developments and artistic approaches to the medium of film.

With universal themes such as Birth, Work, Sex, Security and Health, the exhibition The Life Fair: New Body Products explores how the quest for an optimal body has developed into a highly competitive market. First and foremost in the development of goods and services: commercial parties whose products exploit the fears and desires underlying our physical capacities and vulnerabilities.

This installation, commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and presented at la Rinascente department store in Milan during the 2016 Milan Design Week, is a continuation of Hella Jongerius and Louise Schouwenberg’s collaboration on the manifest ‘Beyond the New’ (2015). A search behind appearances proposes to move beyond commercial success, beyond style differences, and beyond personal taste. The windows of La Rinascente present an interplay of small machines, fabrics and well-orchestrated shadows, which gaily mirror the world of design and suggest criteria for estimating and understanding a design’s cultural value.
The shadow play ‘A search behind appearances’ reflects on the state of affairs in design and prompts a consideration of the meanings which hide behind an object’s look.

EYE presents a major exhibition devoted to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. With his famous trilogy The Adventure, The Night and Eclipse, Antonioni became one of the most innovative directors of the 20th century.
A stylistic perfectionist, he renewed the grammar of film by thinking less in terms of narrative and more in terms of image. Film excerpts projected onto thirteen big exhibition screens show the overpowering visual force of his images. The exhibition also features unique documents, photographs and letters from the Antonioni archive in Ferrara, birthplace of the director.

“Al sinds zijn opening slaagt Eye erin exposities die in een duffe verzameling vitrines met brieven en affiches dreigen te ontaarden, tot cinematografische avonturen te maken. Ook nu is dat gelukt….”

Raymond van de Boogaard in NRC

“..superieure tentoonstelling…”

Jan Pieter Ekker in Het Parool

“..een ideale tentoonstelling…”

Joyce Roodnat in NRC

Utopian Dreams

As part of “Rotterdam celebrates the city!”, collector and former museum director Reyn van der Lugt brings contemporary future fantasies of Rotterdam together. The extensive group exhibition Utopian Dreams provokes a wider debate on the future of Rotterdam.
Participants in this exhibition: Claes Oldenburg, Atelier van Lieshout, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, John Körmeling, Richard Hutten, Utopia, Elfie Tromp, Han Hoogervorst Bruges, Elian Somers, Wim Gijzen and architecture collective Cookies.

In the series of exhibitions devoted to great narrative directors such as Kubrick and Fellini, EYE presented a major exhibition focusing on director David Cronenberg, who acquired cult status with his idiosyncratic films about the relationship between body, mind, technology and mass media. His work is still very relevant in the current age of large-scale technological developments, often with unprecedented effects on the human psyche. The exhibition explored Cronenberg’s world through the main themes of his films: the physical and psychological transformation of his protagonists.

Highlights of this exhibition included the weird and wonderful special effects items from Cronenberg’s films, together with bizarre props, set photos and original costumes.

A major exhibition of the extraordinary work of the Quay Brothers. These American identical twins have built up an enigmatic and dark body of work that includes stop-motion animation, drawings, and performing arts productions.
This exhibition shows their films amidst many of their special sources of inspiration, including artefacts such as scientific collections, curiosity cabinets, and early-twentieth-century drawings by psychiatric patients.

The exhibition presents the universe of the Quay Brothers and, in addition to their films, also features small installations and wonderful diorama boxes, called Dormitorium, which contain the sets they use to make their films. These sets are often meticulously assembled out of used and time-worn objects.

Design for an exhibition on the history of the Dam square in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

Fellini – The Exhibition, arranged as a visual laboratory, reveals the sources of Fellini’s fertile imagination and shows how Fellini created a mythical image of himself and of Italian life both in his films and in the world at large. Moreover, the exhibition sheds light on the way in which he was able to break with the accepted linear narrative structure in his films, and how he addressed existential questions in a playful manner.
The exhibition includes fragments from the films, drawings made by Fellini, Fellini’s advertising films and the countless images from his dreams that inspired him. Furthermore, the exhibition brings together never previously-shown pictures by photographers such as Gideon Bachmann, Deborah Beer and Paul Ronald. Their behind-the-scenes photos illuminate the fantasy world of Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini shot virtually all his later films. An international selection of posters, several of which hail from the EYE collection, showed how Fellini himself tried to influence the public reception of his films over the years. Also on display are an array of magazines from the period 1960-1985 (Domenica and L’Espresso), which played an important role in forming the public image of the director, his films and the actors.

‘Fellini – The Exhibition is geen expositie die van de daken schreeuwt hoe geweldig Fellini was. En die des te meer effect sorteert wanneer je de tijd neemt om alle dwarsverbanden op je in te laten werken. Het van nissen en doorkijkjes vergeven zaalontwerp van Claus Wiersma steekt wat dat betreft precies goed in elkaar: drukke opstellingen maken net op tijd plaats voor grotere ruimtes waar je even op adem kunt komen. Ook geen gedoe met decorstukken… Een facsimile van Fellini’s dromenboek is dan nog het meest opvallende rekwisiet in deze puntgave expositie, die de beelden wonderwel voor zich laat spreken.’

De Volkskrant

Exhibition on the work of the french writer/filmmaker/painter Jean Cocteau.

Presentation of the work of designer Hella Jongerius for KLM as part of the groupshow ‘Self-Unself’ in the Van Abbe museum in Eindhoven.

‘Shortlisted’, but unfortunately not selected proposal for the Dutch pavillion at the 2013 Venice Art Biennale. The proposal featured the most recent work of artist Guido van der Werve, shown in the context of projects by dutch artists working with the same concepts.

Presentation of 80 fashion pieces by Yves Saint Laurent, from the collection of Olivier Chatenet.

Exhibition of recent work by french photographer Bettina Reims en filmmaker Serge Bramly, commissioned by the French Consulate in Hongkong. Collaboration with Hongkong-based design-office Three Dogs Studio.

Parapoetics is the first significant solo exhibition of the Rotterdam-based artist Katarina Zdjelar. TENT presents recent video works by Katarina Zdjelar, in which she uses the singing, pronunciation, alteration or forgetting of language to examine notions of identity, authority and community. In January, a series of events takes place around the themes in her work, with speakers including performer/writer Caroline Bergvall, sociologist Willem Schinkel and philosopher Mladen Dolar.

Traveling exhibition of the nominations for the annual Bouw-in-Beeld photography award. An easy to build wallstructure, adaptable to different locations.

Presentation of Hella Jongerius’ work on colour research in the groupshow ‘Dwarsdesign’ at the Netherlands Architecture Institute.

Design of the architecture photography-exhibition ‘Spectacular City’ in the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam.

Exhibition about new functions on top of existing buildings.

Ruimtelijk ontwerp van de tentoonstelling van het werk:
‘If someone is going to play my part’ van Anneke A. de Boer, in galerij Das Esszimmer.

Mobile exhibition on the highlights of design from Rotterdam. Constructed from CNC-cut cardboard panels.

Exhibition of photography related to the coalmining industry.

Design of an exhibition of videoworks by photographer/filmmaker Ralph Kämena.