Mise en Séance at De Hallen Haarlem

Artists: Martijn Hendriks, Katja Novitskova, Vanessa Safai, Dan Walwin, Marlies Appel, Charles Atlas, Hans van den Ban, Mari A. Boeyen, Wessel Couzijn, Lotti v.d. Gaag, Antoine François Heijligers, Frank van Hemert, Michel Kuipers, Setsuko Nagasawa, Karel Slingervoet, Marianne Souwerbrem, Elias Voet JR, Auke de Vries

Exhibition title: Mise en Séance (Inflected Objects #2 Circulation)

Curated by: Melanie Bühler

Venue: De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Date: January 16 – May 16, 2016

Photography: Gert van Rooij, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and De Hallen Haarlem

Pics or it didn’t happen – experiences turn into millions of images, moving through socio-technical networks and accumulating comments, views and likes. Art is part of this economy of attention: in today’s hyper-networked era we are becoming used to seeing and experiencing artworks online. We encounter them as so many images in the various feeds we scroll through, our fingers touching the screen and our eyes quickly scanning its content.

Pics or it didn’t happen – the installation shot of an exhibition has become more important than the exhibition itself.

The exhibition Mise en Séance considers a different set of artworks: things that didn’t happen – objects that have been filed away in the storage space of Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. They might have had a moment once and have seen the instantaneous light of a digital camera when their picture was taken for the collection’s database, but for now they quietly rest on shelves, are carefully wrapped in boxes or stoically stand in a courtyard. They exist in a state of latency, awaiting their turn to be exhibited. They are not dead, but because they don’t circulate or participate in contemporary media culture’s circuits of visibility, they are also not fully alive. They could be seen as ghosts with a stubborn and decaying materiality that insists on its own objective reality: paint starts to drip, fungus to spread and colors to fade. They exist in their own secluded temporality: the time of the archive.

Mise en Séance stages an environment where artistic practices that are immersed in the logic of digital circulation encounter pieces of the collection of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem that, at first glance, seem radically detached from this logic. These objects were selected from the museum’s storage spaces and resume their place next to artworks that were created in response by Martijn Hendriks, Katja Novitskova, Vanessa Safavi and Dan Walwin. Without labels or any other explanations present in the exhibition space, the artworks have only each other to refer to and engage in a new set of relations. These relations of formal, conceptual and affective affinities are radically different from the logic of the museum that the objects usually report to: its collection and restoration policies and the art historical canon. What counts is what it is here now, the presence of these (art) objects in the exhibition space.

Henk Baard, director of the Frans Hals Museum from 1956 -1972 believed that candlelight could re-animate the 17th century paintings he exhibited. In the same spirit, Mise en Séance conjures a space of ghostly presence in which absent and present, old and new, and past and future merge. As such it investigates rules of circulation, conditions of vitality and the possibility of timeless appeal.

The exhibition Mise en Séance is part of Inflected Object’s second chapter on the topic of Circulation.

Inflected Objects was initiated by the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. The current exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. The project is financially supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Mondriaan Fund.

Wessel Couzijn, Corporate Entity, 1959
Setsuko Nagasawa, Untitled, 1985

Dan Walwin, 2015, 2016

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Support), 2016

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Chandelier, 1780-1790

Katja Novitskova, Out of Africa, 2015

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Corporate entity), 2016

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Corporate entity), 2016, Untitled (Support), 2016

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Unlimited texts), 2016

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Support), 2016

Dan Walwin, No title, 2015

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Katja Novitskova, Approximation IX (calf), 2013
Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (Relational), 2016

Mise en Séance, installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2016

Katja Novitskova, Swoon Motion, 2015
Frank van Hemert, Zeven (Tweedelig) (Seven (Two-Piece)), 1991
Antoine François Heijligers, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1867