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collecting, classifying and narrating as a practice to disembody the
value and semiotic meaning of these types of images. He has done
so, by creating videos, publications and installments of this “found
material”, creating new configurations and their unforeseen significance.
In the exhibition at Van Abbe, after having passed the
previous rooms of Zaatari, who, as described above treats archivereadymade
images with a great amount of care and presents their
vulnerability, the visitor then encountered a video by Snyder where
he compiled in a zapping sequence, diverse types of TV footage
ranging from talent contests, programs about animals and erotica,
weather forecast, etc. which are interrupted in the video with news
about a crisis in the middle east. Due to the zapping the visitor does
not fully get acquainted with the complexity or does not even acquire
complete information on the issue. The work clearly evokes to the
zapping that daily occurs worldwide at private homes with people’s
TVs, where the representation of “a political moment” does not really
catalyze a critical awareness on the subject but rather, it scatters
away amongst the field of entertainment.
Within the framework of institutional collections that comprise the
segments of the exhibition, two inclusions are interesting to acknowledge.
One, also in relation to the context of the Middle-East today,
was the Contemporary Art Museum Palestine (CAMP) by artists
Ayreen Anastas and Raeda Saadeh, whose goal is to establish a
museum the very moment that Palestine becomes a nation. CAMP
has already an existing collection of visual art which has been kept
over the past ten years by the Al-Ma-mal foundation in Jerusalem.
However its nature is of being a nomadic institution that will keep
seeking other museums that in the meantime can serve as hosts.
The Van Abbe Museum is currently a longstanding partner of CAMP
and within this exhibition it has created an installment of some
works from the CAMP collection along with video interviews of its
founders. Finally close to this parasite-museum, the curators of Play
Van Abbe also included the Museum’s Eindhoven BKR collection
from the ICN (Instituut Collectie Nederland), which is comprised of
acquirements made by the efforts of the city council. The artworks
hanged from this collection, included mid-size paintings by Matisse
and Picasso, but most importantly each modern art painting was
accompanied by a filer, that contained all the bureaucratic trouble
and expense that the institution had to go through in order to have
such “masterpieces”. In times of financial crisis in the Netherlands
and in Europe, such juxtaposition between the CAMP and BKR
collection might’ve helped both local and international art audience
to understand the importance of seeking an urgency when it comes
to collecting, because the museum in the 21st century has indeed a
responsibility to define what could be urgent to the society it seeks
to transform.
Notes:
1. In On the Concept of History (1940) Walter Benjamin condemns historicism
for having understood history as the narration of a linear passing
of events, as if the historian would have taken the past as if counting
the beads of a Christian rosary: „Historicism contents itself with establishing
a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state
of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously,
through eventualities which may be separated from it by
millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences
of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads
of a rosary.“
2. Samir Kuntar is a Lebanese Druze former member of the Palestine
Liberation Front. In 1980 Kuntar was sentenced to four life sentences
by Israel and was released in 2008 after a Prisoner exchange deal.
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