Stedelijk Museum Annual Report 2012

Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam
Overview
In 2012, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) focused on Project 1975, a
multi-year program exploring the postcolonial condition of our society and
postcolonialism’s relevance for contemporary art. All of the SMBA exhibitions
mounted in 2012 and almost every activity reflected upon this theme from a variety
of perspectives. Project 1975 presented SMBA with an opportunity to develop,
expand, and strengthen valuable international contacts, and to involve Amsterdambased
artists. At the end of the year, the exhibition series closed with two traveling
exhibitions that resulted from long-standing collaboration with institutions in West
Africa. A survey publication about the project is scheduled for release in the fall of
2013. Outcomes of Project 1975 can be found online at the project’s website:
http://project1975.smba.nl/.
In 2012, the team of the SMBA also prepared a follow-up to Project 1975. This new
venture has since been launched at the Stedelijk Museum under the title Global
Collaborations.
Program
Project 1975
Project 1975 is a reconsideration of the (Western) frameworks and values within
which contemporary art is produced, presented, and discussed. It examines a
number of topics, including the extent to which a postcolonial world order and
society can even be said to exist, and how postcolonialism is perceived to influence
the production and reception of contemporary art. By investigating current
paradigms and terminologies, the project took concrete steps to arrive at new
models and ways of thinking about contemporary art in a world no longer slanted
toward Western modernist ideologies.
Tala Madani’s solo exhibition The Jinn transformed the modernist “white cube” into
a habitat populated by paintings, drawings, and animations of mythological
creatures from Arabian myths and Islamic teachings.
Any Other Business eschewed the traditional space of the white cube and
highlighted other forms in the Western discourse of contemporary art. Artist Nicoline
van Harskamp examined transcripts of lectures, speeches, and debates and used
them as a basis for a conference in which the less savory aspects of impassioned
speeches were subtly underlined, revealing the shortcomings of language in
political discourse.
The three simultaneous solo exhibitions by Bart Groenendaal, Stefan
Ruitenbeek, and Quincy Gario investigated facets of Dutch society by exploring
various forms of interaction and the cultural classification systems that shape them.
The Memories Are Present connected the themes highlighted by previous
exhibitions. Artun Alaska Arasli, Pauline M’barek, and Christoph Westermeier
investigated the motivations that underpin classification systems employed in
museums, with special attention to the distinction drawn between the primitive and
the classical.
The last two Stedelijk exhibitions of 2012 were also the last in the context of Project
1975. The enduring collaboration with the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana—
which entailed in-residence exchanges by artists and curators from both
institutions—culminated in an exhibition titled Time, Trade & Travel, featuring work
by artists from Ghana and the Netherlands. Major themes in this exhibition were the
complexities of global trade driven by capitalism, and their influence on life and art
(in the Netherlands and Ghana, in the West and in Africa). Time, Trade & Travel
opened at SMBA in August and traveled to Accra in November.
The final exhibition of 2012, Hollandaise, examined historic trade relations. African
guest curator Koyo Kouoh focused on processes of appropriation that arose in
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