Categories: Currents

Curators: Hélène Webers and Mels Evers

With this series, Marres presents recent graduates from art academies in the Southern Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. While offering emerging artists and curators a platform, Marres also aims to build an international infrastructure for talent development.

Rumour Has It was curated by Hélène Webers and Mels Evers and presented a selection of contemporary art practice, featuring the work of inspired, young artists from the regions around
Maastricht. It was an impressive selection, with works by nineteen emerging artists, who, after their time at the academy, were now exhibiting their work to a wider public. These works were statements, each with its own execution and themes, which challenged the audience to view the work not as an irrefutable end product, but as a layered means of expression. In relation to current tendencies in contemporary art, the selected artists’ works were both surprising and convincing. They’ve taken flight from the art academies, with their sights firmly set on crossingborders. At the time of this exhibition, their work saw the light of day, it represented a contemporary current within the visual arts.

Rumour Has It was a proposition for searching and finding, both for the artists and the visitor. Amidst environments brimming with stories, shapes, colours, and performances, both met somewhere in the middle.

Curators: Agata Jaworska, Ina Hollmann, Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand

With this series, Marres presents recent graduates from art academies in the Southern Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. While offering emerging artists and curators a platform, Marres also aims to build an international infrastructure for talent development.

Agata Jaworska is invited as guest curator for this year.

Jaworska teaches at the Sandberg Instituut, the Design Academy Eindhoven and the ArtEZ Institute of the arts. As a curator she created several exhibitions. Her outstanding exhibition In No Particular Order during the Dutch Design Week last year showed work of young designers. For Marres Currents #3, Jaworska gathered a team of curators around her. Ina Hollmann, Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand, (former) students of the Design Academy Eindhoven.

“We are interested in the way young artists position themselves in society and in their ideas about what an art practice can be”, says Jaworska. “Marres Currents offers artists the opportunity to think about emerging trends in the region and in broader discussions with artists, teachers, collectors, curators and the public”.

Curators: Isabel van Bos and Evelyn Simons

I Spy, I spy a little lie arose in response to growing frustrations regarding access to information and the valuation of knowledge. Recent events such as the Brexit referendum, undemocratic constitutional referendums in Poland and Turkey, and the presidential election of Donald Trump (which sparked the widespread usage of the term “fake news”), as well as the chaotic reception of the Catalan independence movement, created political turmoil and left the Western world perplexed and polarised. We ask: is it still possible to protect the truth in our contemporary democratic society? And, for that matter, has it ever been possible?

By re-examining the tools we use to communicate with one another, the works in this exhibition addressed how information and knowledge are shared today. In this era of digitalisation, virtualisation, and hyper information, reality exists on levels which seem to surpass our immediate perception. In extent, cyberspace or what we might call the “virtual world” is characterised by a continuous flux of information, facilitating the transfer of our ideas as well as the production of knowledge. In this context, online communities not only access and create content but also assess and regulate its quality. Are we able to protect ourselves from echo chambers, filter bubbles, covert political propaganda, and fake news within this self evaluating system?

An allusion made to ‘I spy’ (a game in which children are given clues of colour or shape in order to guess objects and thus develop their ability to categorise information) introduced the concept of play to the exhibition. What might have seemed like an innocent title at first glance, I spy, I spy a little lie evoked the idea that mere recognition of a dominant discourse does not grant access to truth, since such information is manipulated according to political policies, racial biases and consumerist agendas. Both individual and collective agency must be encouraged in order to refuse a passive citizenship where we would be reduced to the role of apathetic spectators.

For this project, the notion of play was activated through a scenographic intervention by the Italian collective Parasite 2.0, the graphic design by Roxanne Maillet (ERG Brussels), and further mediated in an educational program by Aurélie d’Incau.

Curators: Marian Cousijn, Bertan Selim and Anne Ruygt

From twerking to vlogging children, from the French Revolution to drone warfare and from pickling chestnuts to selling your soul for an ice cream.

Many of the selected artists moved to the Euregion from different parts of the world. Through their work they reflected on society and contemplated belonging in today’s established socio-political order. The artists treated subjects ranging from happiness to alienation; from controversial histories to the perversity of the internet. Their works question morality and focus on the tension that occurs between cultural appropriation, conformism and individualism.

Good Intentions combined photography, video, installation, performance, print and sculpture. Centering on the artists’ personal perspectives and experiences, it illustrated the complexity of self-definition in today’s world.

The exhibition presented the work of 17 emerging artists who recently graduated from Belgian, Dutch and German academies, and is part of the annual Currents series, organised by Marres and Z33.

The works of Pavel Balta and Nasrin Tork consisted partly of performances. During the exhibition they were present a few times in Marres to perform. The audience could for example sell their soul to Balta for an ice cream made of ceramic.

Curators: Barbara Cueto and Bas Hendrikx

The participating artists shared an interest in unravelling stories, whether true or fictionalised, and their work referred to narrativity, and cinematic time. The exhibition played with the cycles of knowing and becoming, and Marres Currents #4: Running Time acted as a framework for their stories to be continued.

The title ‘Running Time’ referred to the moment before an idea solidifies – the occasion that ignites the creative process. In current times of information overload, creative time is scarce. Yet it is this spare time in which a thought becomes a valuable idea, where a gut-feel or an afterimage triggers our attention. Running time is needed for the mind to associate freely, to let latent ideas surface.

Marres Currents #4: Running Time was a group-exhibition with artists who recently graduated in Belgium, the Ruhrgebiet in Germany, and the south of the Netherlands.

We alternatingly desire or fear the flood of information with which we are confronted daily. In the eye of this visual and textual storm, the physical, mental or digital archive appears to offer a moment of repose. The same goes for the artists who test their collection of images, symbols and stories against that mass culture. It is this shared exploration that connected their work in this exhibition. Or as the English proverb has it: birds of a feather flock together.

Curators: Melanie Deboutte & Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

In a variety of forms, from installation to textile, and from video to performance, the selected artworks embodied the diverse streams between subjectivity and context.

Some of the artists were guided by lived experiences, some investigated historical tropes of cultural meaning or mythology through their relevance in a contemporary context and others proposed a highly personal take on systems of language.

For the first time since the start of Currents in 2013, due to the corona pandemic, a (targeted) open call was used to select artists. This gave graduating artists the opportunity to present their work to the curators, as many graduation shows had been canceled or postponed. The talent development process was also different from previous years. The training day, on which in previous years all artists gathered at Marres to present their work to each other and to network, took place online.

The exhibition was part of the long-running project Currents, which is a co-production by Marres and Z33.

Curators: Fenne Saedt (NL) and Lieneke Hulshof (NL).

In Mother(Land), the artists showed that your identity is shaped by your personal history and the places where that history took place. When we look at our parents, and their ancestors, the land they walked on, the cities they lived in, the work they did or the struggles they fought, we come across stories that still inhabit us somewhere deep within. Those stories are now lived; crawl through your skin, feed your taste and define your outlook. They form a family tree: an idea that permeated all the works in this group exhibition. Sometimes literally, sometimes in the form of religions that characterized their childhood, the country of origin that no longer exists or old friendships that have come to feel like a family. An exhibition showing an array of art forms. From sculptures to costumes, from photography to ceramics.