Reflecting Forward is a Digital Immersive Art exhibition that shows endless connections to reveal what the future can look like. 

Reflecting Forward is Irma de Vries first solo show. In MOCO museum, Amsterdam, the exhibition explores how digital technologies can connect us in new ways. she creates an all-accepting place and experience, where space, people, and modern technology blend in harmony. Reflecting Forward includes different installation art rooms.

Maarten van der Glas was involved in brainstorm sessions from the beginning, along the way developing technical concepts and to do development of part of the physical exhibition. Apart from realising the work technically, I also acted as an intermediair between the artistic vision and the translation in the medium of lights and computer software.

The immersive digital art involved a lot of new techniques: 500 individually controllable diamond lights, a light ceiling with 4000 individual LEDS, interactive video screens.

Diamond Matrix

As humans we undergo great pressures, yet socially, failing is not accepted. Diamonds, made of carbon, go through incredible stress, to emerge as shining jewels and one of the strongest materials on earth, so can you.
This installation of hundreds of light-up diamonds expresses that we participate in a bigger picture, sharing more similarities than differences. Life is messy and hard, but it makes us stronger. Celebrate your indestructible shine.

Who are the diamonds in your life?

Links:

http://www.studioirma.com

https://mocomuseum.com

https://www.iamsterdam.com

https://museumtijdschrift.nl/

Behind the Scenes

Light art: Maarten van der Glas

The Floor is Lava was a theatrical exhibition in which artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen populated Marres with sculptures and molded portraits of people in everyday environments. Made from different materials, clay, cloth, wood, the figures had expressive faces, but are otherwise sketchily composed with stick legs, half torso’s and loosely hanging pieces of cloth. The faces seemed mask-like, unrelated to the bodies that support them. They lean against a wall, sit on makeshift chairs, queue at a ticket office, or wait on a platform for a train to arrive at the station.They were actors in search of a play, as much as they were compositions of identity, that fictional moment of stasis in a world that is constantly on the move. The artists played with the idea that people always play a role, different in every situation, with specific character traits and body language.

The title derived from a children’s game in which on command the players immediately have to get their feet off the floor and freeze in a certain position, as if they have been turned into statues.The liquid floor in the game suggests the added meaning of a world that is beyond our control, of shared values that are dissipating, and a future that has become uncertain. The figures inhabit the stage that is left when all that is solid has melted into air. In the cahier all the works on display in the exhibition are further explained.

In a Training the Senses session that took place during the exhibition, the artist duo introduced the audience to the performance How can we know the dancer from the dance? they made earlier. The presentation provided a short training for participants to go outside and make their own detailed observations of theatrical events in everyday life.

SANDER BREURE & WITTE VAN HULZEN

Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen both live and work in Amsterdam. Breure graduated from the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, and Van Hulzen graduated from ArtEZ in Arnhem. Their multidisciplinary work is based on research about body language and its interpretation. They are represented by tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION ON GESTURES OF DOING NOTHING

Next to the exhibition, the joined publication named On Gestures of Doing Nothing made by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen came out on 4 August 2019. On Gestures of Doing Nothing documents a performance staged by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen. The performance took place on April 15 and 16, 2019, in their exhibition The Floor is Lava in Marres. It consisted of eleven performers presenting a series of gestures. The performance – along with the exhibition itself – was photographed by Petra Stavast. This publication was conceived and developed in collaboration with art historian and curator Arnisa Zeqo. The book is published in English.

PRIX DE ROME

In international jury selected Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen together with 3 other artists for the shortlist of Prix de Rome 2019. They received a working budget an were given the opportunity to create new work. The work was exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the fall of 2019.

Press

• De Volkskrant
• BBK
• De Limburger (1)
• Mister Motley
• Metropolis M
• De Limburger (2)
• e-flux
• Het Parool

   

Performance, 30 minutes, 2019

Maarten van der Glas: light art, software development

For this piece Maarten van der Glas developed 4 fake TV screens that were emitting light for all of the cast and stage. The screens were lighting up according to film segments selected by Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, giving the characters a distinct TV glow and a hidden layer for the piece.

In a Flickering Light, the performance by artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, has five characters: four actors, and the light of a screen. The light of the screen–of which the audience sees only the reflection–makes the muscles of the four actors react, contract and contort. Their faces smile, get scared, cry and admire. The facial expressions of the faces lit by the screen change from mask to mask. Are these masks a reaction to what they see on the screen? Or are they a ritualised expression of their feelings? They could also be read as an exposé of a canon of facial expressions, reminiscent of the series of frozen grimaces that Franz Xaver Messerschmidt sculpted between 1770 and 1783. At the end of his life, he obsessively studied himself in the mirror–like a kind of Narcissus–creating self portraits possessed by a spirit that visited him at night. All faces, if we do an exercise in abstraction and see them on a close-up, become masks. Masks evoke the Jungian archetypes, such as those Grotowski worked with in his “Poor Theater,” searching for the expression of a sharpened consciousness.

Concept and directed by:
Sander Breure
Witte van Hulzen

Performed by:
Anneke Sluiters
Chandana Sarma
Karina Holla
Phi Nguyen

Light Art: Maarten van der Glas

Curated by Marta Ramos

Performed at:
MACBA, Barcelona
Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam

Links

Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen

https://loop-barcelona.com/

Credits:
Concept, software development and direction: Maarten van der Glas
Choreography and dance: Anastasia Kostner

Performances:
2016 – Opening ‘De Bovenkamer’, Radion,  Amsterdam, Netherlands
2016 – Gallery Bart, Amsterdam, Netherlands