ZERO Squared
In 2014, I was asked if I would like to create an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Tilburg, for which I had to select works by female artists from the collection that I could connect with the works of two well-known Nul artists: Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven. The request came after I had published a monograph on Henk Peeters together with Jonneke Jobse. We often forget that Henk Peeters worked with textiles, but that was not the main reason for the invitation. The selection was primarily about autonomous work and the visual and material relationships between Nul art and the work of the yet to select female artists from the collection. Simplicity, but also tactility and sensuality, were key concepts.
The female artists? The ones I selected were Corrie de Boer, Madeleine Bosscher, Marian Bijlenga, Ria van Eyk, Marijke de Goey, Loes van der Horst, Beppe Kessler and Lam de Wolf. I not only greatly enjoyed creating this exhibition and seeing the final result, but their history has never left me since. Female artists of abstraction continued to be a recurring topic of discussion.
Even this year, in 2025, Catrien Schreuder told me that the exhibition Abstract Art by Women Then and Now at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam originated from the ideas I had put forward on this subject. The exhibition was on view there from September 28, 2024, to March 9, 2025.
The Dreamed Obviousness
The Dreamed Obviousness features two artists: Jaap Drupsteen (1942) and Tarik Barri (1978). Drupsteen is a Dutch graphic designer who has worked for organizations such as NOS, VPRO, and VARA, as well as for De Nederlandsche Bank, designing a series of banknotes, and for the Dutch government, creating a new design for the Dutch passport. He gained widespread recognition as the designer of the exterior of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum. In 1998, he began creating video animations for musical performances and started performing as a VJ himself, eventually moving on to live cinema projects.
Barri is a Dutch audiovisual composer based in Berlin. After studying architecture in Delft and psychology in Nijmegen, he pursued an education in Audio Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, after which he developed his own audiovisual software, Versum. From 2009 onward, he collaborated extensively with Monolake, followed by regular performances with Thom Yorke and Lea Fabrikant.
In the film, I engage in a conversation with both artists about two topics that interests the three of us: the synchronicity of image and sound and the synergy of the live performance. In this video portrait, they discuss their artistic ideas, creative processes, live performances, and collaborations with other musicians.
The video consists of two parts, with a total running time of 69 minutes.
Subtitled in English.
The trailer:
The film was created in response to the publication of A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands: Platforms, Policies, Technologies (Jap Sam Books, 2019) by Sanneke Huisman and Marga van Mechelen.
For screening opportunities, please contact: [email protected].
Related publication: Marga van Mechelen, “What’s in the name live cinema”, Petris, J.L and Martínez Mendoza, R. (eds.). Trayectorias. Proceedings of the 4º World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS). Session Artes y lenguajes, November 2020, 135-146.
Interview for Syn-Thèses
In February 2023, the editors of the online magazine Syn-Thèses contacted me. They had become very curious about the film I made with Sanneke Huisman (The Dreamed Obviousness) after seeing the trailer. They asked me if I would agree to an interview for issue 5 (2024), “Intermedial Crossovers in Audiovisual and Interactive Arts”. Maria-Ilia Katsaridou (Ionian University) was one of the two guest-editors and it was she who would like to do the interview. We had to postpone our meeting a bit, because she had lost twelve of her students in the horrific train accident in Greece. On April 13, 2023, she came to my house for a long interview, that was published in the summer of 2024.
Interview with Marga van Mechelen by Maria Katsaridou (Ionian University of Corfu) for the academic electronic journal Syn-Thèses (No 15 2024), special issue Intermedial Crossovers in Audiovisual and Interactive Arts: