Johan van der Keuken
From The Body and the City
Wexner Center, Colombus
September 18 – December 30, 2001
“Film is not life, but it has to touch your life. It’s a second life.”—Johan van der Keuken
An exhibition of multimedia works documenting street life in New York, Amsterdam, and Sarajevo by Dutch artist Johan van der Keuken opens at the Wexner Center this fall. Known for his exquisitely shot images of urban settings around the globe, van der Keuken had an astonishing career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world. His gallery works, which combine film, photography, and sound, have never been shown in the United States. “The idea,” wrote the artist about these works, “is to use image, projection, sound, and visual instruments to create individual and distinct worlds and atmospheres.”
The three installations at the Wexner Center are part of the series The Body and the City, created in collaboration with designer Jeroen de Vries, who comes to the Wexner Center to help install the exhibition.
Reflecting Johan van der Keuken’s international perspective, the three installations on view here are New York/Colours on 42nd Street, Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, and Amsterdam/Two Streets. These works, all produced in 1998, consist of multiple photographs and moving images on film and video, focusing on the individual set against documentary backdrops of urban scenes. Wrote Artforum, these environments “draw visitors into and out of the exhibition space, to transform spectators into active participants, and, ultimately, to recall the violence and chaos of ‘what’s happening on the street.’”
In Johan van der Keuken’s own words, following are descriptions of the three installations:
• New York/Colours on 42nd Street, featuring a wall of 32 large-scale color photographs, plus film: “On 42nd Street between Times Square and Eight Avenue, I came across a long row of shops, their roll-down shutters all closed and painted in bright colors. I spent hours on the sidewalk across from the roll-down shutters, photographing passers-by walking past the fields of color. With their own bright colors, they seemed to represent an entire society. In the exhibition, the photographs are arranged adjacent to each other to form a huge mosaic of colour fields with people in them, one big human chessboard. A flat surface with the feeling: The Old New World: America!”• Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, incorporating black-and-white photographs and film: “In November, 1993, my friend and colleague Frank Vellenga and I went to Sarajevo to show several films at the festival held there amidst Serbian gunfire and sniper ambushes. We also shot a 14-minute film showing moments in the day-to-day life of a city under siege with the underlying question: What purpose does it serve to make a film in wartime? Our main character was Marijela Margeta, an architecture student who risked her life to attend all the films at the festival.”• Amsterdam/Two Streets, featuring two series of black-and-white photographs: “Two ‘lanes’ of photographs that are technically and aesthetically very different are confronted with each other. They run parallel or cross each other, much as streets do. On one lane, pictures of Dam Street can be seen through ‘holes’ in the black surface of the photographs like keyholes, so the view is largely restricted. Dam Street in the old center of Amsterdam is populated by an odd mixture of old timers, tourists, dropouts, junkies, and dealers. The opposite lane consists of pictures of Haarlemmerdijk. An old-fashioned shopping street now characterized by enormous mobility: stores, snack bars and coffee shops come and go, premises are constructed and demolished. I have photographed images of this street in layers one over the other, as multiple exposures with control and coincidence each playing an equal role.”
The Body and the City, a series of eight installations, has been exhibited in various combinations in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has hosted a retrospective of van der Keuken’s films this year, but his gallery installations have never before been exhibited in the United States.
Johan van der Keuken: From The Body and the City was curated by Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s curator of media arts.
Johan van der Keuken (1938–2001) emerged as an artist in 1955 with the publication of his first photography collection, We Are 17. After studying film in Paris, he embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world with retrospectives in Montreal, Paris (at the Centre Georges Pompidou), and Holland. The artist became known for his evocative images and films that revealed an interest in the global circulation of capital, the erosion of traditional ways of life, the divide between rich and poor, racial and religious conflicts, and the place of chance and control in photography and film.
Jeroen de Vries has been compiling and designing innovative photo and media exhibitions for more than two decades, most recently in the cities of Belgrade and Porto. He designed the recent catalogue of Johan van der Keuken’s photographs, The Lucid Eye. He divides his time between Amsterdam and Belgrade.
WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210
www.wexarts.org