Group Exhibition: Un Sentiment de Comme Si

Opening: Friday 4 July, 5 – 8 pm

with performances by Cecilia Bengtsson and Hannah Dawn Henderson

Curator: Virginie Bobin

A special publication edited by Virginie Bobin with contributions by the artists, the curator and curator and writer Chris Fitzpatrick will be released for the exhibition.

Play – as French intellectual Roger Caillois wrote in his seminal 1958 study Man, Play and Games – usually elicits “un sentiment de comme si”, an impression of as if: an awareness that one operates in a specific space and time, separated from a more troubled reality. It is a space of anticipation, of rehearsal for the processes of negotiation and persuasion and the agonism that inhabit this reality. This space of exception is not far from that of the school – or the exhibition space : both spaces of illusion, of in-lusio – or entering the game.

When the game in question is called “artistic research”, the possibilities for play increase commensurately to the importance of the “process”. The exhibition and performance program Un Sentiment de comme si (An Impression of As If) investigates possible ways of sharing processes of artistic research through the display of both works in progress and final works retracing the paths explored by the Graduates from the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) over the course of two years. It embraces story-telling, narrative transfers, communication gaps, translation glitches and the suspension of (dis)belief, and convokes multiple voices that wave through the exhibition both figuratively and physically. Stories, films, performances, scores, exercises and sculptures by Cecilia Bengtsson, Sharelly Emanuelson, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Annabel Kanaar, Quenton Miller, Sara Pape Garcia and Julia Reist meet works by Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Robert Ashley, Samuel Beckett and Dora Garcia, presented here as discreet presences that trigger further correspondences for both the artists and the visitors, suggesting that the exhibition is not an end but yet another step in the games played.

Daily performance program:

Dora García,  The Instant Narrative, 3 – 5 pm, Cecilia Bengtsson

Please note: extra GEMAK opening hours on Sunday 6 July, 1-5 pm and on Wednesday 9 July GEMAK will be closed to the public

Between 11 and 17 July, the exhibition will be continued at the Royal Academy of Art as part of the Graduation Show.