Roomade

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ROOMADE
Formation1996
FoundersBarbara Vanderlinden, Johannes Van Heddegem
Dissolved2006
TypeNonprofit Arts organisation
Registration no.BE456466855
Location
  • Brussels, Belgium
FieldsContemporary art
Artistic Director
Barbara Vanderlinden (1996–2006)

Roomade was a Brussels-based arts organisation founded in 1996 by Barbara Vanderlinden, directed and curated until 2006 by Vanderlinden, it commissioned and produced a string of notable exhibition projects and publications.[1]

Roomade was described as "an organisation working with artists, philosophers and other intellectuals on projects that can hardly be commercialised or 'musealised.'[2]

History[edit]

The emergence of Roomade was directly linked to the finding that in the mid-1990s, Brussels lacked several vital functions and spaces for contemporary visual art. Roomade intended to fill this gap and take creative action on this terrain vague.

The idea for Roomade was developed in 1995 primarily by Barbara Vanderlinden (founder). It was supported early on by international artists, such as American artist-curator Fareed Armaly, who came up with its name "Roomade," a contraction of the words "room" and "made," to express the ideas of "making room," and creating hospitable spaces for the encounter and connection between art, the sciences, the city, and the public.

De Witte Raaf, described Roomade as an organisation "for the production of art projects outside the traditional exhibition circuit, embedded in a specific social situation and intended for a new audience."[3] In 2001, Knack wrote, "The emphasis is always on elements of the artistic or scientific trajectory, which fit less easily within the structures of the current art world. Usually, famous people are invited – such as Matt Mullican, Bruce Mau, Bruno Latour, Chantal Mouffe… – but Roomade always tries to introduce a slight shift in the dominant public image of these figures."[2]

Organization[edit]

The non-profit organisation was established in 1996. Vanderlinden had invited, among others, Johannes Van Heddegem, Belgian politician Eric Antonis (1941–2014), curator Bart Cassiman, and collector Anton Herbert (1938–2021), to become members of the board of directors. Johannes Van Heddegem became its first president.

The organisation was led by a small team, including, among others, project coordinators Sophie Lauwers, Anne Judong and Stefan Huber. Funding included several government bodies: Flemish Community, Flemish Community Commission (VGC), European Commission's Culture 2000 program, City of Antwerp, and Antwerpen Open VZW.

Initially the organisation rented modest quarters housed in the cloister of the Jesuit fathers in Brussels (Saint-Josse-ten-Noode), in 1999 Roomade moved to a former banana ripening building from the 1950s in the Koopliedenstraat in Brussels where it had offices, a library, an archive, a lecture hall and presentation room from 1999 to 2006. The building also housed the offices of the art newspaper De Witte Raaf (The White Raven) and Argos center for audiovisual arts.

In 2006, the board of directors of Roomade transited the organisation to launch the first Brussels Biennial, after which the legal entity of Roomade ceased to exist.[4][5]

Notable projects[edit]

Notable projects included Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis (1996), Laboratorium (with Hans-Ulrich Obrist) (1999), Indiscipline (2000), Boris Groys: The Art of Judgement Show (2000–2002), Carsten Höller: The Boudewijn Experiment (2000–2001), and the Office Tower Projects series (1996–1998) at the Brussels' Manhattan Center, a hallucinatory form of megalomaniac metropolitan high-rise that got out of hand, but also a dream ground for creative thinking. "Roomade rightly interpreted the core of the problem as an insane miscalculation of scale and formulated the subtitle of her Office Tower Manhattan Center Project as a counter-proposal: On the desperate and long neglected need for small events."[6]

Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis, 1996[edit]

Matt_Mullican Under Hypnosis, Roomade (Lunatheater studio), Brussels. © Photo 1996 Barbara Vanderlinden

Fifteen public performances were staged at different locations in Brussels in 1996 and recorded on video. They were exceptional in that they were carried out by the artist under hypnosis and had such titles as Making a Drawing as a 4-Year-Old, Looking for a Picture and Entering a Picture or simply Smelling. They were like reconstructions of the artist Matt Mullican's identity, built from memories and images stored in his subconscious to be addressed during the performances, outside censuring consciousness. The curiosity of what happens when critical consciousness is suspended was precisely what Mullican was after in these performances.[7] All performances took places in various private and public locations in Brussels and on Friday 3 May 1997 Mullican performed "Under Hypnosis" in the Zuilenzaal of the Arenberg Institute in Louvain. It was the first time since the late 1970s that Mullican showed his hypnosis performance to an audience.[8]

Office tower projects, 1996–1999[edit]

Office Tower Manhattan Center Projects, 1996–1997[edit]

This project took place in the Manhattan Tower annex Sheraton Hotel a major building in the North District of Brussels. This complex with parking and shopping arcades had a vacancy rate of about 40%. On request of Roomade it made a number of its floors available for its exhibition projects. Titled On the Desperate and long neglected need for small events, the project included continuous video projections by Marie José Burki lit up in 4 storefronts on the Bolwerklaan from 7 p.m. until morning. On the windows appeared greatly enlarged bird cages containing a finch, which is constantly bouncing from one perch to the other. On the 12th floor, ten video projections were continuously shown of the performances under hypnosis that Matt Mullican performed in the previous year in Brussels and Louvain on behalf of Roomade. On the 26th floor one could find Agency by Kobe Matthys, a module composed of plasterboards with TV, sound system and some sofas.[9] Participating artists and projects: Marie-José Burki: Exposure / Exposure Daylight (ground floor); Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis (12th floor); Regina Möller: Meinen Arbeitsplatz gibt es noch nicht (My Job Hasn't been invented yet) (20th floor); Kobe Matthys: Agentschap (26th floor).[6][9]

Century Center Project, 1999[edit]

Tomoko Takahashi, Office Work at Century Center, Roomade - Century Center Project, Antwerp, 1999 © Photo1999 Barbara Vanderlinden.

In 1999, Antwerp Open, an urban culture unit of the City of Antwerp, invited Barbara Vanderlinden from Roomade to conceive the contemporary visual arts section in the context of the Van Dyck year. In addition to the Laboratorium exhibition and the Ambient City project, she started the Century Center Project,[10] a series of exhibitions on vacant office floors of the Century Center, London Tower, De Keyserlei 58–60 in 2018 Antwerp. This was in the immediate vicinity of the Central Station where one could take the elevator to the vacant floors via an inconspicuous glass front between a burger joint and a newsagent. For a month, the fourth second of the Century Center was the solitary workspace of the Korean Koo Jeong-a. The result was a poetic installation with countless and sometimes almost imperceptible intervention by Koo. The most striking 'things' were put together scale models of a postal, telecommunications and station building. The glue used, the scissors and the razor-sharp blades were scattered here and there. The presentation of the banal everyday materials at the interface between waste and art. There were constellations with flakes of walls and pencils or elastic bands scattered in a pictorial way and mini architectural models made of plastic packaging boxes. Here and there she sprinkled talcum powder on a table or around the contours of objects as 'snow.' About this project, Luc Lambrecht wrote in the Dutch daily newspaper De Morgen: "For the general public, it remains a problematic exhibition: there is little to see, but with a little fingertip a whole world can open up. It is precisely in the non-artistic nature of this intervention that lies the poetry that clings to the ordinary and neglected detail of everyday life."[11] After a presentation by Koo Jeong-a on the second floor, the exhibition Office Project by Tomoko Takahashi opened on the fourth floor,[12] where she exhibited piles of discarded office furniture, computer screens and hardware, toys, tools, typewriters, household utensils, and all kinds of junk. She meticulously assembled this material into islands of activity and workplaces. In the 'archive' there was a pile of computer paper on the floor. Elsewhere in a 'process room' there was a mass of electronics next to a cluttered series of photos of numbered containers; in the 'accounting' department, calculators rattle, and so on. Elsewhere, smaller compositions laid on the floor, again built around a particular motif or function (for example, a coffee corner, a technique section [for coarse and fine], and a relaxation area). Here and there, an image monitor was lighted up hesitantly, a fan was spinning, or a turntable spun something trivial endlessly. Takahashi allowed enough chaos and accidents to stop an all too one-sided interpretation. Via the centrally located void, visitors from the upper floor of the temporary exhibition space could look at the lower floors, which served as offices.[13]

Ambient City, 1999[edit]

Ambient City - Transient RADIO was a month long transient radio in the city of Antwerp. Conceived by Tommi Grönlund, Pettri Nisunen, Iiro Auterinnen, Matti Knaapi and commissioned by Roomade. At night, when passing the KMSK Koninklijke Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, a huge sculpture could be seen lighting up on the museum roof. The dancing light captured the cadence of the live broadcast programs of Ambient City, a radio experiment by a number of Finnish artists. Anyone who wanted to listen in to the overcrowded program that ran day and night could simply tune in to frequency Antwerp 93.9.[14]

Laboratorium, 1999[edit]

The last exhibition that Roomade conceived for the Van Dyck year was the Laboratorium exhibition project of the curators Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The purpose of "Laboratorium" was to "identify the limits and the possibilities of the places where culture and knowledge are made", by setting up in the city "networks linking the very specialized works of scientists, artists, dancers and writers."[15] It intended to exhibit the places where science and art are practiced: laboratories and workshops or studios. Since these are production sites, where processes are underway, there could be no question of a ready-made exhibition. No static display of objects. No strict demarcation on the walls and in the rooms of a museum. No catalog at the start. That came at the end, when the Book Machine developed by Bruce Mau had done its job. Laboratorium did not posit any premise about the relations between art and science. It was based on an encounter between the working processes of artists and scientists in their studios, workshops, and laboratories, which were open to the public for the occasion. The discussions resulted in a network to which the public was connected.[16][17][18] Travelled as Laboratorium Archives (in collaboration with Nico Dockx and Kobe Matthys) to Z33, Hasselt, 2002; as Laboratorium (as part of Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Galleries, and artist Olafur Eliasson) to Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik [19] where the archive of the exhibition Laboratorium was presented on a framework by Yona Friedman.[20]

Indiscipline, 2000[edit]

Indiscipline were eight "presentations" from artists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, theatre makers and others throughout the city of Brussels and at the Center Brussels 2000 and on the website of Roomade. The idea was to challenge the intellectuals to participate in the creative process of exhibition making and to place their intellectual findings into direct publicness. On the other hand, Indiscipline invited the artists to go beyond the language of their respective disciplines. In doing so, the project was "undisciplined" and moved between the structures of theater, happening, exhibitions, workshops and the internet and demonstrated the complexity of culture and cultural production. The project was co-curated by Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffmann. Participants included: Richard Foreman, Suely Rolnik, Chantal Mouffe, Everlyn Nicodemus, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé.[21]

Carsten Höller: The Boudewijn Experiment, 2000–2001[edit]

Carsten Höller, The Baudouin Boudewijn Experiment, Roomade - Atomium, Brussels, 2001. © Photo Barbara Vanderlinden.
Carsten Höller, The Baudouin Boudewijn Experiment, Roomade - Atomium, Brussels, 2001. © Photo Barbara Vanderlinden.

The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment took place in one of Belgium's most famous architectural landmarks: the Atomium. Built as the Belgian Pavilion for the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, the Atomium imitates the structure of an atom, and is made up of nine spheres connected by tubes. In the Brussels and European Conference Rooms, situated in the central sphere, a space was set up to accommodate 100 people who were invited to spend twenty-four hours in the space, stepping out of their usual, "productive" lives for one day. From 10.00 AM on 27 September until 10.00 AM on 28 September 2001, the space was closed to the outside world. Public access was denied, and the inhabitants were allowed to cease their normal activities. They didn't do nothing at all, and they did it collectively. The necessary infrastructure such as furniture, food, sanitary installations and safety measures were provided. Though no particular programme or means of entertainment was suggested, participants were free to bring with them what they wished. Essentially, the experiment was an experience what happens when people are freed from their usual constraints and yet collectively confined to a particular space and time. The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment was not documented by means of film or video; the only "recordings" were the memories of the participants, and were disseminated through the stories they told after the event. The experiment was thus completely unscientific, since objectivity was not the aim. Rather, it was a unique opportunity to experience together the possibilities of escape from one's daily routine, to participate in a unique event with an unclear outcome. Those taking part in the experiment were following the example of the late H.M. Baudouin, King of Belgium, who was declared incapable of governing the country for twenty-four hours on 4 April 1990, and thus suspended his royal activities during this period.

The Manifesta Decade, 2005[edit]

In tandem with its contemporary art projects, Roomade undertook a series of critical studies that examine exhibition practices and their histories.The Manifesta Decade, Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (2005; co published by MIT Press) marked the inauguration of this series.[22]

Exhibition history (selection)[edit]

Solo exhibitions

  • Gert Verhoeven: Papa m'a + préproduction, Roomade, Brialmontstraat, Brussels, January 31–end date unknown, 1997.[23]
  • Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis, various location in Brussels and Louvain-Leuven, April 28–May 4, 1996. Including Lunatheater (appartement 604), Brussels, April 28, 1996; Nieuwstraat-Rue Neuve, Brussels, May 1, 1996; Plateau Theater, Brussels, May 2, 1996; Arenberg Institute, Louvain-Leuven, May 3, 1996; Lunatheater (appartement 604), Brussels, May 4, 1996.
  • Marie-José Burki: Exposure / Exposure Daylight, Grimbergen Airfield, Grimbergen, August 30, 1997.
  • Carsten Höller: The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment. A Deliberate, Non-Fatalistic, Large-Scale Group Experiment in Deviation, Centrum Brussel 2000 and divers locations in Brussels, October 26–December 3, 2000 (canceled). Restaged at the Atomium, Eeuwfeestlaan, 1020 Brussels, September 27–28, 2001, 24 hours from 10 AM to 10 AM.
  • Boris Groys: The Art Judgement Show, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, January 10, 2001, and Roomade, April–May, 2001. Traveled as Poglej in presodi / The Art Judgement Show to Mala Galerija, April 11–May 27,[24] 2001; The seventh international art fair Art Moscow, May 15–20, 2003.[25]

Group exhibitions

References[edit]

  1. ^ Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. "Summer 2022". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2022-08-08.
  2. ^ a b Gielen, Pascal (March–April 2002). "The Art Judgement Show". De Witte Raaf. Brussels.
  3. ^ Braet, Jan (1997-03-11). "Stad van kleine gebeurtenissen". Knack (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-08-08.
  4. ^ Lorent, Claude. "Une B.B. collective". La Libre.be (in French). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  5. ^ "KORT - Anciaux wil ,,Vlaamse biënnale in Brussel". De Standaard (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  6. ^ a b Braet, Jan (1997-03-11). "Stad van kleine gebeurtenissen". Knack (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  7. ^ ArtFacts. "Matt Mullican - Matt Mullican under Hypnosis, 1996 | Exhibition". ArtFacts. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  8. ^ Mollé, Bart (April 29, 1996). "Matt Mullican met "Under Hypnosis" in het Arenberginstituut. De kunstenaar op automatische piloot" (PDF). Veto (Jaargang 22, , 1995–1996): 13.
  9. ^ a b "Office Tower Manhattan Center Project – De Witte Raaf" (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  10. ^ "Ambient City (transient radio) – De Witte Raaf" (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  11. ^ Lambrechts, Luk (1999-03-17). "Koo Jeong-a: archeologe van het alledaagse". De Morgen (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  12. ^ "beeldende kunst – Pagina 4 – De Witte Raaf" (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  13. ^ Wynants, Etienne. "Tomoko Takahashi – De Witte Raaf" (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  14. ^ Pültau, Dirk. "Ambient City (transient radio) – De Witte Raaf, Maart-April 1999". De Witte Raaf (in Flemish). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  15. ^ a b Vanderlinden, Barbara & Hans Ulrich Obrist (1999). Laboratorium programme book. Antwerpen Open & Roomade.
  16. ^ Obrist, Hans Ulrich; Raẓā, Asad (2014). Ways of Curating (2016 ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  17. ^ Holmes, Brian (2000). "Le Mode De Diffusion- Expositions et Environnement Urbain". Parachute (No. 98, Avril, Mai et Juin): 68–70.
  18. ^ Braet, Jan (1999-06-29). "Missen is wenselijk". Knack (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-07-20.
  19. ^ a b Obrist, Hans Ulrich; Vanderlinden, Barbara (2009). Experiment Marathon Hans Ulrich Obrist & Olafur Eliasson. Londen Koenig Books.
  20. ^ Ónafngreindur (2015-01-05). "Experiment Marathon Reykjavik". artmuseum.is. Retrieved 2022-07-20.
  21. ^ Withers, Rachel (2000). "Previews". Artforum International (September 2000).
  22. ^ Vanderlinden, Barbara; Filipovic, Elena (2005). The Manifesta decade : debates on contemporary art exhibitions and biennials in post-wall Europe. The MIT Press. p. 339. ISBN 0-262-22076-8. OCLC 959158417.
  23. ^ Braet, Jan (1996-02-13). "EEN KORTE WANDELING". Knack (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  24. ^ "History of the Banka Slovenije's exhibition room Mala galerija". www.bsi.si. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  25. ^ Artdaily. "Seventh International Art Fair Art Moscow Opens". artdaily.cc. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
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