Exhibition at Art Space OrganHaus (Chongching) 2009

Eric Von Robertson – Cloudburst (Installation with umbrella’s)

download Umbrella fact sheet

Participating artists
1. Wouter Venema -video
2. Lotje van Lieshout – video/performance
3. Judith Leysner – video/performance
4. Paula Albuquerque – interactive media installation
5. Sang Woo Kang – drawings/small sculpture
6. Bojana Panevska – video/performance
7. Eric Von Robertson – sculpture/installation

Curators Paul Donker Duyvis – Xaowen Ju
in Collaboration with Sandberg Institute.

All invited artists are working and living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and have all studied at a Fine Arts Post-Graduate Program under the umbrella of the Sandberg Institute. Amsterdam is a multicultural Metropolis, the global city. Amsterdam with 743.104 inhabitants, counts 175 nationalities, more than any other city in the world!

Chonquing is much bigger, 31.442.300 inhabitant, but less known in the world, but not for long we expect… After Beijing and Shanghai is Chongqing China´s third biggest city.
The Huang Jue Ping art district in Chongqing is one of the most important art areas next to the 798 in Beijing and Moganshan in Shanghai. Organhause Art Space is a non-profit and independent art organization, founded in 2001,
It is located next to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. It organizes multi-media art-exhibitions and cross-media art activities for young and experimental artists. They are concerning about the process of China’s urbanization and the global village in the context of the international exchange of art. The two cities have litle in common except rain and two famous Art institutes, the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie that hosts the post-Graduate program Sandberg Institute.

Umbrella is the first coherent presentation of Art from Amsterdam and the Netherlands in Sichuan. It is also an interactive public event. Apart from the performances in and outdoors, meetings will be held in the evenings…Q and A with the participating artists and meetings with the artists from Chongqing and discussions with the public.

Top: ‘Life is drunk, death is dream.’ Zeng Tu | Bottom: ‘Carps’. Wu Junyong

Besides from the KunstRai, where you can find a yearly overview of commercial galleries, the Sandberg Institute wanted to create an art fair showing other kinds of art i.e. non established art. The KunstRai did not approve of this idea, prohibiting the initial title ‘Not the KunstRai’ which thus instead became, ‘Niet de Kunstvlaai’ – ‘Not the Art Pie’, taking its place not in the Rai but in the Westergasfabriek.

Here artist initiatives from the Netherlands were invited to represent themselves with their best work. At the same time postgraduate studies similar to the Sandberg Institute joined in. This collaboration resulted in a lively, well attended art fair showing upcoming art; art not yet institutionalized, art looking for new ways. According to the response from the public and press, ‘Niet de Kunstvlaai’ was an unexpected success. It functioned as a spontaneous market: exhibiting artists were introduced to other initiatives and as a result could exhibit their work throughout the country. This enabled relatively isolated artist initiatives to gain more attention.

For the second edition the name changed to ‘De Kunstvlaai.’  Every edition since, De Kunstvlaai has been marked by something extra.  For the second, Dutch contributors were invited to introduce a foreign colleague next to their own presentation. Around twenty foreign initiatives ranging from Belgium to Indonesia were present. In its third edition, De Kunstvlaai highlighted the work of young artists who recently received a stipendium from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).  The fourth became a platform for the first One Minutes exhibition and The One Minutes Awards ceremony.