Vrijdag 23 Juni 2017

In Lamu, the island on the east coast of Kenya, everybody is building. All this I tried to paint: the self-built houses, men using abandoned houses as a gathering place in the afternoon, the strange heaps of chalk, trees that grow inside a house, the stairs and pilars in old Swahili houses, the sewer-system in the street, bachelor huts that look like tree-houses, attempts of finding the right niru colour on an ancient wall, bare greyish walls build with blocks of coral stone. In the library I will show drawings about the Maktaba ya Sanaa, the attempts I did so far to gather books for an Arts library in Lamu. The exhibition can be seen during office hours in the corridors on the third floor and in the library (ground floor) of the Pieter de la Court building.

ascleiden

In the collaborative project titled No Joke, artists Roger Ballen (1950, VS) and Asger Carlsen (1973, DK) explore the more sinister sides of the human psyche. Together the duo produced 37 images, without ever working in the same studio at the same time: their creative exchange and co-creation has been a purely online affair. Their menacing work evokes a sense of anxiety and longing that is usually experienced only in dreams. Although Roger Ballen lives in Johannesburg and Asger Carlsen in New York, the two artists have been working together online for some four years.

foam