Koen Kloosterhuis at P/////AKT

Artist: Koen Kloosterhuis

Exhibition title: Spaghetti Rain

Venue: P/////AKT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: June 26 – July 31, 2022

Photography: Charlott Markus / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and P/////AKT, Amsterdam

Three reanimated crows, inspired by their plastic lookalikes placed in gardens to scare away pigeons, and animatronics found in haunted house rides, ‘greet’ the visitor as they cross the threshold and wander through the exhibition space; turning them into an intruder. Within the space, the crows create a domain of privacy and secrecy that is inherent to most backyards. The electronics, attached on the outside of the birds instead of being concealed within, function as external organs meant to force the stuffed crows to speak. It is a single voice, belonging to one crow, that echoes its way through the second and has almost disappeared by the time it reaches the third.

Scattered across the floor lie chunks of concrete. A wing, a head, a hand, an elephant’s trunk; the remains of a carefully dissected gathering of garden statues, originally collected by my father. Fragments of bodies that are endlessly reproducible. Clones and copies not bound to time or space—reduced to decoration, degraded to kitsch.

Strands of spaghetti covered in red sauce have fallen on top of the debris. We once had a neighbor that would feed his leftover spaghetti to the crows living near our street. In the sky, the birds would fight each other over the bloody scraps, sometimes accidentally dropping them into my father’s backyard, marking the concrete tiles and stone statues with yellow strings and splashes of red.

Backed into the corner, slightly elevated from the floor, stands the untreated and vulnerable garden house that, instead of providing a solution to survive in an inhospitable environment—like its predecessor the log cabin—has become a place associated with leisure, relaxation and daydreaming. A sanctuary from the outside world placed on the edge of the domestic sphere; a room at the end of the garden.

The Artist’s Library

The Artist’s Library is a growing collection of titles that have, in one way or another, been relevant to the project or the artist’s practice in general. They will be on view during the exhibition and afterwards become part of the P/////AKTSALON collection of books. Koen Kloosterhuis highly recommends:

– Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection, 1982
– Vilém Flusser, ‘Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion’, in Writings, 2004

About P/////AKT

P/////AKT is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the opportunity to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.

P/////AKT provides a platform for exceptional, emerging artistic talents, who distinguish themselves through their unique and authentic language and who are capable of giving a different view on the current way of thinking. They are stimulated to work out new developments and are given the opportunity to present their work to a relevant audience. Furthermore, P/////AKT always asks the artists to produce new work that relates to the specific nature and dimensions of the given space and to present their own mental space as an overall presentation within the given context.

Koen Kloosterhuis, Spaghetti Rain, installation views and details, P/////AKT, 2022. Photographs by Charlott Markus, courtesy of P/////AKT, Amsterdam