Uncertainty Seminars: Other Than Art's Sake

Contributions by:
Dena Yago (artist, K-Hole co-founder and creative strategy consultant), Simone Zeefuik (writer and organizer whose work focuses on representation and inclusivity), Yamuna Forzani (artist, textile designer and LGBTQ+ activist), Stijn Verhoeff (artist and climate activist), Sjoerd Leijten (musician), discourse | Katayoun Arian (curator, writer and researcher), Christian Nyampeta (artist), Daniela & Linda Dostálková (artists), Susan Ploetz (artist, somatic consultant and live action role play designer), Jacco van Uden (professor of Change Management research group The Hague University), Mercedes Azpilicueta (visual and performance artist), Céline Berger (artist), Martijntje Hallmann (head of Residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten).

- 19.35 hrs: Screening: premiere of Ansage Ende, a new film by artist Stijn Verhoeff and musician Sjoerd Leijten, calling for an activist approach to the climate crisis.

- 20:15 hrs: Screening: the seminal film Other Than Art's Sake (1973-74) by Peter Kennedy
This film captures Adrian Piper, Hans Haacke, Judy Chicago and other artists developing an alternative practice outside of art institutions.
- 20:55 hrs: Break

- 21:15 hrs: Presentation based on the real-life experience of a month-long job-rotation between change management researcher Jacco van Uden and artist Mercedes Azpilicueta and the film they have made about this exchange in collaboration with artist Celine Berger. The film Since we are here is on view at Stroom's entrance space throughout the weekend. On Friday evening Jacco van Uden, Céline Berger and Martijntje Hallmann (head of Residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten) will share their thoughts on the project.

- 15.00 hrs: Intro Ilga Minjon & Radna Rumping (curators)
- 15.10 hrs: Daniela & Linda Dostálková: prelude (short video The Anecdote (2018, 2 min. 15 sec.)

- 15.15 hrs: Lecture by Dena Yago
Artist, co-founder of K-Hole and creative strategy consultant Dena Yago will talk about the creation of value in a hyper branded world.
- 16.15 hrs: Rainbow Tea Party by Yamuna Forzani
Artist, textile designer and LGBTQ+ activist Yamuna Forzani organizes a Rainbow Tea Party with Bella Dolcii Angels Mizrahi, Noa Angels Mizrahi, Miila Angels Prodigy and Raoef Aalias, presenting different personalities and views from the community, who share their crafts and stories with you in an intimate and indulging setting.
- 17.15 hrs: Lecture by Simone Zeefuik
The work of the writer and organizer Simone Zeefuik centers around representation, inclusivity and social justice.

- 19.00 hrs: Lecture performance by discourse | Katayoun Arian
Lecture performance by discourse (also known as curator, writer and researcher Katayoun Arian). This lecture places Iranian musical archives of the 1950s to 1970s, and particularly its female vocalists, at the center of inquiry, using sound, image, language, space and memory, as a curatorial act that moves beyond sheer revisionism.

- Screenings of film Since We Are Here (Jacco van Uden, Céline Berger en Mercedes Azpilicueta) in the entrance space.
- Sound work Life after Life by Christian Nyampeta on a screen in the library.
- Installation and backdrop by The Rodina in the entrance space.

* The title Other Than Art's Sake refers to a film by Peter Kennedy from 1973-1974, which proposed an alternative model for art - art for social change rather than art for art's sake.

Curators: Ilga Minjon & Radna Rumping
Design: The Rodina

Christian Nyampeta's work untangles a wide variety of ‘languages' in which his artistic practice blurs traditional boundaries between domains such as canonized history, cinema, music and ethnography.
Christian has provided two contributions: an archival piece from Radius, a radio station with online programs, occasional gatherings in temporary studios, exhibitions and publications, addressing themes like language and translation, sociability, longing and belonging. Radius, while marking its 5-year anniversary since it was conceived at Stroom (How To Live Together, Radius, 2014), still congregates in public institutions, in intimate circles at homes, in transnational research groups and across bodies and spaces that are not easy to describe. The song is issued from the recording of Downtime, a spatial and sonic program conceived with artist Tom Richards, whose self-made analogue electronic instruments provided the 24/7 downtime soundtrack of Radius at Stroom in 2014.
Life after Life (2016, 19 min, installed in the library) is a fictitious sequel to the 1992 film Guelwaar in which a man is buried in the wrong grave. It commences when its protagonist wakes up in the wrong heaven, and must find how to get by in this unforeseen condition.
www.christiannyampeta.com

Susan Ploetz
Susan Ploetz conducts artistic research through embodied simulations and co-creative world building using techniques from progressive larping and somatic practices. She focuses on multisensory imagination, which is not strictly language based but follows the knowledge of the body. LARP stands for live action role-playing, a game where participants explore in a playful way scenarios, while interacting with each other in character. For Uncertainty Seminars Susan Ploetz developed the workshop Senses of Security, dealing with senses of security and law making through speculative social prototyping. Keeping the context of The Hague as International City of Peace and Justice in mind, participants are invited to engage with how interpersonal and bodily senses of safety could be scaled up to methods of law making.
https://susanploetz.com

Stijn Verhoeff is an artist with an interest in music, literature and activism. Sjoerd Leijten is a musician and radio maker with a focus on dissident sounds, improvisation and politics. Together they've developed audio and video works, presented in site-specific installations or screening experiences. Their new short film Ansage Ende (2019) explores the relationships between text, music and image and calls in an atmospheric manner for an activist approach to the climate crisis. The film moves from an imaginative journey through an empty landscape, to the visible climate destruction around a brown coal mine, into an old barn - ending with a short, but poignant sci-fi excursion where a megaphone choir suggests a collective uprising: "The seas are rising and so are we!"
www.stijnverhoeff.org

Other Than Art's Sake by Peter Kennedy
Artist Peter Kennedy experiments with art forms and content since the early 1970s, when he was the first to present neon works in Australia and co-founded the conceptual art space Inhibodress Gallery in Sydney. His seminal film Other Than Art's Sake (1973-74) looks at the work and ideas of New York, Los Angeles and London based artists Adrian Piper, Hans Haacke, Charles Simonds, David Medalla, Ian Breakwell, Stephen Willats, Judy Chicago and art historian Arlene Raven. Specific to the cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the film draws on liberal, democratic and humanist ideals and examines the ways in which their practice, as artists, responds to those ideals. The film offers a unique view into alternative artistic practices that remain relatable, if not urgent as ever, in contemporary practice today.
Originally filmed in 16mm black and white film with optical sound, 42 min.
This screening uses a digital copy that is 36:41 min; due to sound issues David Medalla's segment is not included.

Céline Berger, Martijntje Hallmann and Jacco van Uden
In March 2017 Mercedes Azpilicueta and Jacco van Uden swapped jobs for a full month. Mercedes took on the position as head of a research group on change management, while Jacco took over Mercedes' work as a visual and performance artist. The aim of this exchange was to explore how art and organization relate to each other. Investigating and questioning the preconceptions of the worlds we work in - the world of ‘the other' as well as one's own world. In a style that mirrors the capricious nature of the job swap itself, the short film Since we are here (2019) made in collaboration with Céline Berger, reflects on experiences that are as much individual as they are universal: feeling estranged, adjusting to new spaces, and finding new areas for action. The film is on view at Stroom throughout the weekend. On Friday evening Jacco van Uden, Céline Berger and Martijntje Hallmann share their thoughts on the project.

Mercedes Azpilicueta (1981) is a visual and performance artist from Argentina based in the Netherlands. She was artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015-16. Céline Berger (1973) is a French visual artist living in Cologne, Germany. Trained in physics and material sciences, she worked for various international microelectronic companies as a project engineer from 1997 to 2008. Céline was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in 2012-13. Jacco van Uden (1972) is a professor of Change Management research group (lectoraat) at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Martijntje Hallman is head of Residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.

Daniela & Linda Dostálková
The work of Daniela & Linda Dostálková deals with a concept of the autonomous hybrid social ‘art practice'—blurring the lines between disciplines, challenging accepted distinctions, in the questioning of identity. They trace unexpected articulations of alternative/commodified forms of organizations that are based in the art world and its institutional structures; understanding social phenomena, objects, things, and concepts and the fluidity of boundaries between them. As an interlude to the Uncertainty Seminars program, their short video The Anecdote (2018, sound, 2 min 15 sec —HD video loop) will be screened.

Dena Yago
Dena Yago (1988) is an artist and writer who lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Force Majeure, High Art (Paris, 2019), The Shortest Shadow, Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, 2018) and The Lusting Breed, Bodega (New York, USA, 2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Warsaw, PL, 2017); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2016) and Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, CH, 2014). She has a forthcoming book of poetry titled Fade the Lure, co-published with After Eight Books and High Art Gallery, out this September. Yago's writing has appeared in Frieze Magazine, e-flux and Flash Art. Yago is a founding member of the collective K-HOLE, active from 2010 - 2016. In Uncertainty Seminars: Other Than Art's Sake, she addresses the creation of value in a hyper-branded world, questions of content and exchange and how the blurring of lines between fields of art, marketing and activism can work either way.

Yamuna Forzani
Based in The Hague, Yamuna Forzani is a fashion and textile artist as well as an LGBTQ+ activist from the UK. "Utopia is a really important concept to me as it provides an aesthetic form through which artists can engage effectively with politics and potential subject matter. That is also why collaboration is so important to me, as working with different people gives a whole other perspective". Today, she organises a Rainbow Tea Party, with Bella Dolcii Angels Mizrahi, Noa Angels Mizrahi, Miila Angels Prodigy and Raoef Aalias, presenting different personalities and views from the community, who share their crafts and stories with you in an intimate and indulging setting.

Simone Zeefuik
Simone Zeefuik is an Amsterdam based writer, cultural programmer and organizer whose work centers around representation, inclusivity and social justice. She focuses on Africentred perspectives, decolonizing knowledge institutes, the illegalized members of the Afro-Dutch communities and (digital) archives. Her main interests are film, literature and theatre. Zeefuik is currently working on finalizing the script of Nour, her play about a woman-led, Afro-Dutch party making its way to the Dutch Houses of Parliament. She's a programmer at Bijlmer Parktheater, lectures at the Sandberg Institute, teaches at Zawdie Sandvliet's Afro-Dutch Studies course, often collaborates with the Research Center for Material Culture, but also self-initiates projects such as #RewriteTheInstitute, Blaccupy and the Topple Dem Statues-workshop series. Her presentation zooms in on her work and forms of activism in- and outside of cultural institutions.

left gallery: rite of access & Ryan Kuo
left gallery is an online platform that produces and sells works of art as downloadable objects. rite of access is the project now on view in Stroom's exhibition space in which left gallery questions access to public art in the digital age. It takes place in the framework of our new experimental program Our House Your Home in which various organizations are invited to our premises to do the things they find the most urgent, fitting, or challenging. In the exhibition, artist Ryan Kuo presents his new work Faith, a screen-based AI entity that uses voice chat and digital animation to sketch a symbiotic relationship between right-wing trolls and centrist liberalism in popular discourse. In Uncertainty Seminars: Other Than Art's Sake, the piece will be collectively activated with the audience.

discourse | Katayoun Arian
Katayoun Arian is a freelance curator, writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She also DJ's under the moniker ‘discourse'. As an interdisciplinary practitioner, her practice oscillates between writing, research, curatorial work, community organizing and DJ-ing as a way of shaping a self-directed mix-mode research and curatorial practice that moves beyond the confines of disciplinary categorization. Working towards an organic interconnectivity between different fields of enquiry, her DJ-lecture performance combines different media and formats, circling around the question of what aural and immaterial archives can do in rethinking our cultural imaginaries and sonic imagination. This lecture places Iranian musical archives of the 1950s to 1970s, and particularly its female vocalists, at the center of inquiry, using sound, image, language, space and memory.

The Rodina
interior design and backdrop
The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) is a design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play and subversion. For Stroom Den Haag they have developed numerous designs for programs and exhibitions since 2014 with WeberWoche - a program celebrating re-enchantment in arts and society - and Attempts to Read the World (Differently), a thematic program about the potential of boundless imagination for a world in drastic change, the umbrella under which Uncertainty Seminars was born in 2017. For this new series in 2019, the Rodina created a Map of Scattered Society, a backdrop and furniture partly made out of Stroom's former entrance space architecture.
The shapes in the map pulling the regions' lines are based on extraterrestrial meteorological weather flows, while the geometric forms work as a vertigo to soak the viewer into this playground. The Rodina believes in importance of ‘playing' for an empathic society to develop, inspired by Johan Huizinga's writings about the homo ludens. The map was developed with a strong sensitivity to the concepts of Uncertainty as a critical tool, notions of networked affect and with fictional names that point to inspiration of the program and imagined places the mind might visit.
therodina.com