Categories: Exhibition

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

The latter is also an important starting point for Katja Mater. While she tries to capture the poetry of the moment, she unveils the beauty of basic laws of physics.

What We See And What We Know is the first retrospective of work by visual artist Katja Mater. She examines ways to capture possible realities. She blends and splits colours, explores the laws of perspective and space, and shows how one medium passes into the other. Mater layers, compresses, stretches and rotates images in time. This way she plays with our expectation that photography captures reality in one single moment. Maters images exist parallel tot this reality and invite us to redefine the relationship between what we see and what we know. In addition to four new works that Mater produced for the exhibition, a broad selection from her oeuvre was presented.

What We See And What We Know marks the beginning of the new exhibition programme of Marres under Valentijn Byvanck, who was appointed as the new director of Marres in March 2013.

Curators: Chris Kabel and Valentijn Byvanck

Others neglect family and friends. Many go looking for sunny destinations, subtropical islands or the solarium. Opinions on the causes of winter depression differ. What is certain is that our metabolism adjusts to when it’s cold outside and the days are shorter. We have a slower pace and our senses miss stimuli. It’s a state that harks back to hibernation. Science and industry view the lack of sunlight as the culprit and stress the importance of light therapy. Dutch hospitals have special rooms for this therapy. With the help of ingenious wake-up lamps, Philips ensures people can alleviate their winter blues at home as well.

The emphasis on light can make us forget that our other senses also fall short of stimulation in the winter. We miss the scent of flowers and plants, the feeling of bare feet in the sand, the sound of crickets in the summer.
For the Winter Anti Depression Show, Marres invited a team of designers and artists to create a house that immerses visitors in a variety of sensory experiences. They turned Marres temporarily into an Art Resort.

Curator: Daan Bakker

Unlike books, 3D-manuscripts reveal their content as visual statements. Some are directly accessible, others must be unfolded, and yet others need to be performed; the variety is endless. Marres exhibited a large selection of Vedute, including works by Peter Struycken, Marina Abramovic, JCJ VanderHeyden, Paul Panhuysen, 75B, Adriaan Geuze, Marlies Dekkers and Krijn de Koning.

The exhibition also featured a new series of Vedute objects that have been made in 2013 and 2014 at academies of fine arts, design and architecture throughout the Netherlands.

For this exhibition Marres opened its whole house, including the basement, attic, office and icehouse for this special, multi-coloured collection, with film, text, and touchable. The exhibition led to the secret corners of the Marres house.

The Vedute Foundation was established in 1991. In its 22 years, the collection has grown to more than 200 spatial manuscripts. The New Institute manages the collection. Visit www.vedute.nl for detailed information about the entire Vedute collection.
The opening of he exhibition took place on 17 April 2014. Find images of the opening here.

Curators: Juha van ‘t Zelfde and Valentijn Byvanck

What do we actually hear of the landscape in which we live? The drone of cars, revving scooters, and rumbling trams. Shop doorbells, church bells, ringtones, and singing birds. Heels tapping on the pavement, children’s voices in the school, and cows in the countryside… We hear them, but rarely listen. With 11th-century liturgy and experimental music, ordinary sounds and electronic noise, soundtracks of sharks, web DJs, speech karaoke, radio, and voices, Marres opened a world of sound that had Maastricht buzzing during the summer.

In Marres, works were presented by Haroon Mirza, Ryan Gander, Sarah van Sonsbeeck, Lyndsey Housden, Chaim van Luit, Joseph Beuys, Anri Sala, Nishiko, and Paul Devens.

In addition to the group exhibition in Marres, Undertones took place at various locations in Maastricht: the marl caves in Sint Pieter, the Sint Servatius Basilica, the Kazematten, Intro in Situ and the Minderbroedersberg. On these locations, visitors could listen to sound installations and live performances by: Kaffe Matthews, Espen Sommer Eide, Grandelavoix, Rutger Zuydervelt and Mark Blain, Thomas Rutgers and Jitske Blom, and David Helbich.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

Sometimes we wish that we had written history differently. Or had left it unwritten because the perspective was one-sided, unjust or brutal. We wish to undo that history because it provides a perspective that we no longer accept or that we even loathe. At other times, our new sensitivities uncover histories that have never been told because they were considered unimportant, forgotten, unfinished or overtaken by other perspectives.

The Unwritten was dedicated to these forgotten stories. Histories that strongly appeal to our imagination and empathy. We feel nostalgia for a lost world, anger at injustices, euphoria with the correction of those injustices, dismay at a wrong turn and relief at a right one. They are all emotional and sometimes even sensory experiences caused by the unexpected turn that history sometimes takes and the way it has erased other stories.

Curator: Ardi Poels

Two late medieval Books of Hours formed the basis, showing the virtuous hand of the often unknown masters. Notwithstanding their strict schemata, these artists knew how to open the door to a new era, with a flourish of style, a coded letter, a small change to a pattern or the sensitive use of materials. Works by contemporary artists enter into a dialogue with these Books of Hours. Medieval aureoles echo in the performance of William Hunt. Droplets of sweat slowly falling to the floor in Oscar Santillan’s A Hymn recall Mary’s suffering. Artists looked for a forgotten soul, a safe refuge, a new relation to the body and the senses. In doing so, they showed surprising spiritual correspondences between early modern art and the art of today.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

The silent understanding with a loved one. Intimacy is a much sought after yet hard to find value. It is taken for granted and yet we cherish it as a rarity. We feel intimacy in the body’s safety, in spiritual anchoring, in the love, sex, and attention of those close to us. We experience it in a negative sense when accidentally interrupting a situation or conversation not meant for us, or the failed reproductions of intimacy on Facebook, in dating programs or the genre of reality TV.

Curators: Levi van Veluw and Valentijn Byvanck

After entering the space, the visitors found themselves in a maze of corridors, atmospheres and perspectives that challenged their senses. With The Relativity of Matter, Van Veluw presented an all-encompassing scenographic experience that immersed visitors in a world of disparate forms of expression.
Levi van Veluw’s installation at Marres Capucijnenstraat 98 Maastricht allows a limited number of visitors.

The Dutch television programme Kunstuur interviewed Levi van Veluw about The Relativity of Matter.

Curators: Brett Littman and Valentijn Byvanck

The exhibition Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity is a homage to Adrià’s exploration of creativity and how this quest led to his revolutionary cuisine. It is filled with hundreds of colourful drawings and includes a film of the nearly two thousand dishes prepared by Adrià and his team in their more than twenty years at El Bulli. The epicentre of the exhibition was a specially designed hall of mirrors, with an infinite landscape of over one hundred floating, delectable objects: glass tumblers in every possible shape, metal ‘amuse’ dishes, spoons for smelling, plates of paper, slate and glass, Plasticine models indicating the size of a dish and cuttings showing how food should be cut.

Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity gave you a behind-the-scenes-view of Adrià’s search for ingredients and new ways to prepare and serve food. It was also a testament to how much thought he has always put into the history of cooking and taste. His method could be compared to the creative process of a scientist, designer or artist: exploratory, tireless, innovative and always surprising.

Accompanying the exhibition is the English publication Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity. Emphasizing the role of drawing in Adrià’s quest to understand creativity, the book features an interview between Ferran Adrià and Brett Littman, and also includes a reprint of the artist Richard Hamilton’s essay about the relationship of food to contemporary art. The publication is available in our online shop.

Curators: Claire van Els and Laura Mudde

The exhibition The Measure of our Traveling Feet was curated by Laura Mudde and Claire van Els and focused on the social and cultural significance of migration. What does the world beyond the border have to offer? In which ways does travel change the past and alter identities? Paulien Oltheten documented her journey on current and historical routes from eastern and central Europe to the west. Shilpa Gupta immersed visitors in the confusion that is typical of arrival in an unfamiliar environment, while Mounira Al Solh intimately captured migrants’ stories.

Large numbers of migrants are risking their lives in order to enter Europe. We see images of small boats afloat at sea, men in helmets and a deluge of drowned refugees. We hear about illegal settlements, desperate families and ruthless smugglers. The journeys of these refugees stand in stark contrast to the free movement of inhabitants of the European Union. While the world seems within arm’s reach to Europeans because of the euro, the open borders and the cheap airline tickets, the continent is becoming a closed fortress from the outside. Discussions revolve around migration, social inequality and the moving of feet that has always been part and parcel of these issues.

The exhibition title was derived from a poem by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) about the changing rhythm of life in modern England during the Industrial Revolution. How does the flow of refugees accelerate today’s pace, and how does it relate to the routes we ourselves traverse?

Curator: Yvonne Grootenboer

Way past a sunny day at the beach, the modern leisure industry offers space tours, Tinder trips, mindfulness cruises and ecology flights. Some vacationers take a short break from a stressful job. Incidentally, they reorganize their lives forever. Most return with fresh resolve to continue their daily life. Vacation has thus become an intricate part of our working routine and is characterized by the same desire for stability, physical comfort, and a lack of surprises.

The exhibition Marres Tourist Office offered new stimuli to the tourist in various forms: a walk through Maastricht with an audio guide about the life of a famous artist, a picknick in the backyard of Marres and an opportunity for visitors to build their own castle with LEGO stones. During the weekends, Marres organised a full programme consisting of lectures and performances by Hans Aarsman, Wiel Kusters, Doina Kraal, a DJ-set by Mike Moonen and live radio shows by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee radio. The mix is still available via Radio Marres.

Curators: 策展人 LIU Chengrui — 刘成瑞 and Valentijn Byvanck — 瓦伦丁·拜凡克

This group is often viewed as a new generation of artists, the so-called post-80s generation. Instead of expressing their relationship to the west, as earlier Chinese artists have done, members of this post-80s generation search for an introspective and independent exploration of art and society. Within this framework, they produce a rich and varied body of works. Yan Bing’s wheat murals echo the yellow earth of the countryside of his home province Gansu. Chen Youtong, biologist and native of Guangzhou, transformed his studio into a factory-lab hybrid to study the life of microbes. Kun Niao is a magazine editor and a recognized poet, Lin Ke one of China’s most prolific internet artists.

Poets of Beijing was held in the Wiebengahal in Maastricht.

Curators: Gijs Frieling and Valentijn Byvanck

Are renewed nationalism, xenophobia, the distrust of politics and democracy, the arrival of refugees, and economic insecurity preparing us for a terrible meltdown? It is well possible. This should give us hope for this project, since the best art is produced on the verge of despair, when civilizations crumble and we’re about to shift into a new world order.

Marres Maastricht produced a spectacular mural about Europe by nineteen artists who have painted all rooms, corridors, the stairwell, floors and ceilings of the historic Marres House. The Painted Bird depicted a series of beautiful and frightening environments. Like a high-tech clone supermarket, the last surviving piece of primeval forest, a Berlin love and hippie fest space, a spider portrait corridor, a new life festival in the year 2050. But also paintings of Charlemagne, the shisha girls, PJ Harvey and the Romanovs, the naked sages. A soundtrack led visitors from room to room, from dream to nightmare.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

The program consisted of a series of performances that were called Marres Movements. The program added moving bodies and musical performances to the landscape of wall paintings. The exhibition transformed into a massive stage for performance, dance, music and art.

Performers and dancers entered the exhibition during opening hours with several improvised and scripted pieces and interventions as well as a musical tour through the city.

Curators: Lex ter Braak and Huib Haye van der Werf

Many artists probe the underlying layers of our social and political reality. They expose what is concealed and penetrate to other times. Like archaeologists, they make the invisible visible.

The Materiality of the Invisible showed the results together with the work of 24 other artists. The exhibition spread out over the three locations, Marres, Van Eyck and Bureau Europa. Van Eyck was a partner in the multi-year EU project NEARCH – New scenarios for a community-involved archaeology. For this project, they selected six international artists who each collaborated with two archaeological partners.

The opening of the exhibition on Tuesday 29th of August coincided with the annual meeting of the EAA (European Association of Archaeologists), which took place in Maastricht in 2017.

Curators: Luiza Mello en Valentijn Byvanck

Once you’re inside, there is no escape. The pressure of the environment is so powerful and hypnotic that it propels people into a dreamstate. The exhibition Dreaming Awake presented a tropical rainforest peeled back in layers. The exhibition was about the experience of touch caused by strong outside forces. Dreaming Awake aimed to bring that experience to the visitors of Marres.

The immersive project was developed by the Brazilian curator Luiza Mello and Marres director Valentijn Byvanck, in collaboration with the artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Luiz Zerbini.

The large Jugendstil windows and the view on a garden with cactuses, eucalyptus and palm trees found their way into Picasso’s paintings. These interior landscapes, as Picasso called them, show unfinished paintings and sculptures, painters’ materials, musical instruments and other objects that he used as props in his work.

At Marres, van Kreij presented hundreds of drawings and gouache paintings, from monumental works on thick watercolor paper to loose series on sketchbook paper, advertising leaflets and other printed matter. He combined these works with sound sculptures made from collected and found materials and a series of stools from his studio. At the historical Marres house with its intimate rooms and beautiful city garden, an association with Picasso’s summery studio on the Mediterranean coast arisose almost instantly.

In the past years, Marijn van Kreij has worked on a series of drawings and paintings modeled after Picasso’s interior landscapes. Reproductions in books form the starting point of a new creation process, focused on the act of drawing and painting. Van Kreij: ‘I empty out the image, and at the same time it fills itself with new interpretations.’ The artist is alone in his studio when he appropriates the images and examines the possibility of endlessly applying differences. At some point, however, he wishes to involve others. He created the title work of the exhibition Marijn van Kreij: Nude in the Studio in collaboration with schoolchildren from the Japanese mountain village Kamiyama.

Curator: Erich Weiss

Do you knock on wood when you want something good to happen or blow out birthday candles after making a wish? What about stepping on sidewalk cracks, killing spiders, shattering mirrors and opening an umbrella indoors?

Curator, artist and magic thinker Erich Weiss assembled a wonderful cast for this subject: Nina Beier & Simon Dybbroe Møller, Otto Berchem, Pierre Bismuth, Santiago Borja, Ulla von Brandenburg, Stefan Brüggemann, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Keren Cytter, Uri Geller, Joachim Koester, Germaine Kruip, Nils Nova, Joanna Piotrowska, John Stezaker and Mungo Thomson.

Artists have always had a fascination with phenomena that defy rational explanation. The surrealists were obsessed with the analysis and creative possibilities of dream states. Authors including Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and Alan Ginsberg explored (sometimes with help of drugs) the boundaries between reality and fiction. Directors Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovski captured the way superstition informed the imagination and consciousness.

Superstition was an exhibition about magic and illusion. Artists have always had a fascination with phenomena that defy rational explanation. The surrealists were obsessed with the analysis and creative possibilities of dream states. Authors including Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and Alan Ginsberg explored (sometimes with help of drugs) the boundaries between reality and fiction. Directors Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovski captured the way superstition informed the imagination and consciousness.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

In the run-up to Museum Motus Mori, choreographer Katja Heitmann asked herself a simple question: can human movement be exhibited? This is a question that is often raised in dance, since the discipline has no standardized notation. The body of a dancer, it is often said, is the archive of dance. But the same question also applies to the world outside dance. Our archives and museums collect portraits, objects, and writings but not the gestures and movements of important people. In our homes, we also save letters, objects, and photographs of our loved ones, but we lose the poses, movements, and reflexes that make them instantly recognizable. To compensate for this loss, Katja Heitmann and ten dancers created Museum Motus Mori, a museum of dying physical movement, for Marres. To create the museum, the choreographer and her team spent two months in Marres.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

Made from different materials, clay, cloth, wood, the figures had expressive faces, but are otherwise sketchily composed with stick legs, half torso’s and loosely hanging pieces of cloth. The faces seemed mask-like, unrelated to the bodies that support them. They lean against a wall, sit on makeshift chairs, queue at a ticket office, or wait on a platform for a train to arrive at the station.They were actors in search of a play, as much as they were compositions of identity, that fictional moment of stasis in a world that is constantly on the move. The artists played with the idea that people always play a role, different in every situation, with specific character traits and body language.

The title derived from a children’s game in which on command the players immediately have to get their feet off the floor and freeze in a certain position, as if they have been turned into statues. The liquid floor in the game suggests the added meaning of a world that is beyond our control, of shared values that are dissipating, and a future that has become uncertain. The figures inhabit the stage that is left when all that is solid has melted into air. In the cahier all the works on display in the exhibition are further explained.

In a Training the Senses session that took place during the exhibition, the artist duo introduced the audience to the performance How can we know the dancer from the dance? they made earlier. The presentation provided a short training for participants to go outside and make their own detailed observations of theatrical events in everyday life.

Curator: Valentijn Byvanck

Together with singer Mari Kvien Brunvoll and tuba player Martin Taxt, he roamed the rooms of the house in search of forgotten voices, partly by making the walls and floors, doors and stairs resonate and partly by making compositions based on what the house produces.

The album, the composer says, was not so much ‘made for the house, but with the house’. The result was a wonderful spatial album that unfolded like a modern symphony, spread out in parts across the rooms. The tracks took visitors through the building, room by room, following the shadows of the nightly performances, the history of the respective areas explained in detail. They heard songs, melodies, and rhythms, with the voices and perspectives of the performers reproduced simultaneously from multiple angles as if the house was a mirrored palace of sound. The music transformed the building into a place where countless worlds are possible – completely free from the view or presence of a particular thing or subject. The source of inspiration, the famous novel The Waves (1931) by the British author Virginia Woolf, was found in the interweaving of different voices and times. Jochem Vanden Ecker was asked to document the entire process.

In recent years Espen Sommer Eide and Valentijn Byvanck, director of Marres and curator of this exhibition, conducted a series of discussions that eventually led to the exhibition The Waves. These conversations have been processed into an interview that has been published in the cahier.

Espen Sommer Eide, Mari Kvien Brunvoll and Martin Taxt gave a guided tour of the exhibition
during a Training the Senses session. They explained room by room how the pieces of music
were created.

Curators: Company New Heroes and Valentijn Byvanck

Bolleke, a caravan equipped with audio equipment, visited several festivals to collect erotic fantasies. Visitors of Yes, Please! could read and listen to these stories in several dreamlike spaces decorated with a gigantic pink womb, veils of shame, vibrating fluffy carpets and kinky objects in a kitchen. The spaces played with visitors shame and curiosity, who watched each other as they read and listened. Also, unlike conventional exhibitions, they were encouraged to “touch everything except the other visitors.”

Pascal Leboucq created the exhibition design, and sound artist Marc Alberto created the soundtracks. The dramaturgy of the exhibition, in which the research is also shared, was in the hands of Lucas De Man. The exhibition was part of the project Yes, Please!, a broad research to erotic fantasies.