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Contemporary Art Listings The Hague

Tag: Voorlinden

  • Christian Marclay: Doors at Museum Voorlinden

    Christian Marclay: Doors at Museum Voorlinden

    For ten years, Christian Marclay collected film clips in which doors open or close. In the video installation Doors (2022), he edits them so that actors appear to walk, via an apparently infinite succession of doors, from one space into the next. Each cut occurs precisely at the moment someone passes through a doorway, granting access not only to the next film fragment but also to its new soundscape. Thanks to the virtuoso montage, the work unfolds as an almost labyrinthine odyssey, door after door.

    Chrisitian Marclay’s moving-image collage Doors draws on clips spanning genres and eras – from silent cinema and the French New Wave to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, in both black-and-white and colour. His montage connects dozens of film scenes via doorways in an endless loop, with no clear beginning or end. He creates a flow, an illusion of continuity, and a visual narrative that follows actors as they continue to walk through doors to ever-new spaces. Each cut transitions to a different film, allowing the actors to navigate endless passageways, architectural spaces, and time planes. Doors thus takes you on a journey through the boundless world of film.

    ‘Doors are fascinating objects, rich with symbolism. They can hide or reveal, express opposites of light or dark, exterior or interior, open or closed. […] They are commonplace, yet unfamiliar. We find ourselves wondering what is on the other side, where we may end up. There is fear and anxiety we associate with the unknown, but also anticipation and potential.’ – Christian Marclay

    About Christian Marclay
    Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives and works in London. He has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and Tate Modern in London. In 2011, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale for ‘The Clock’. Christian studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva and began experimenting in the late 1970s with records and turntables to mix sounds, soon making a name for himself as a pioneering deejay before becoming a visual artist.

  • The Life of Things at Museum Voorlinden

    The Life of Things at Museum Voorlinden

    Things are everywhere. We create them, collect them, cherish them, give them meaning, and just as easily discard them. Artists notice what we often overlook — hidden within all these objects around us: the stories, memories, societal developments, and even new artworks. In the collection exhibition The Life of Things, Voorlinden delves into the world of objects: what do they really reveal about us?

    With sculptures, still lifes, readymades, and installations, the artists in the collection exhibition The Life of Things reveal what the objects around us convey — about our relationships, systems, and the meanings we create through them. The exhibition opens with the impressive work Famished Road (2023) by Ibrahim Mahama. He has constructed a monumental 5-by-10-metre wall made up of around 2,000 shoemaker’s boxes. Created especially for Voorlinden, the work almost obstructs the passageway, embodying histories while exuding life and hope.

    Collection Voorlinden reflected
    From Ai Weiwei, Hans Op de Beeck, and Michael Craig-Martin to Sun Yitian, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, and Wouter Paijmans – the exhibition The Life of Things reflects the breadth of the Voorlinden collection. It showcases works by both internationally renowned artists and emerging talent from the Low Countries, alongside globetrotters such as He Xiangyu and Anouk Kruithof. The latter constructs a pixelated landscape at Voorlinden using 3,500 books from the former GDR. Each book has its own story, and together they reflect how digitalisation seems to be replacing the physical object. The Life of Things concludes with an installation by Oliver Beer, giving a voice to objects from all eras and across the world.

    Artists and Catalogue
    The Life of Things features work by: Ai Weiwei, Hans Op de Beeck, Oliver Beer, Joseph Cornell, Tony Cragg, Michael Craig-Martin, Martin Creed, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Theaster Gates, Sayre Gomez, Joseph Grigely, He Xiangyu, Niels Hoebers, Raoul Hynckes, Jannis Kounellis, Anouk Kruithof, Ibrahim Mahama, Giorgio Morandi, Noor Nuyten, Claes Oldenburg, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Wouter Paijmans, Sun Yitian, Gavin Turk, Edmund de Waal, Evelyn Taocheng Wang. A catalogue has also been made to accompany the exhibition, including an introduction by Barbara Bos, Head of Exhibitions, an interview with Ibrahim Mahama, and an essay by philosopher Emanuele Coccia.

  • Mark Manders: Mindstudy at Museum Voorlinden

    Mark Manders: Mindstudy at Museum Voorlinden

    Mark Manders (1968) explores the quiet depths of human consciousness. The internationally acclaimed artist fixes thoughts and moments in sculptures, paintings and installations that hover between the tangible and the elusive. His oeuvre breathes a poetic tension: intimate and universal, concrete and mysterious. For his solo exhibition Mindstudy at Voorlinden, he brings together more than eighty works –both iconic and more recent pieces – which together form a layered journey through his world of thought.

    Mark Manders, who grew up in Volkel in North Brabant, is one of the most respected artists of his generation. From his studio in Ronse, Belgium, he creates a rich, idiosyncratic body of work of sculptures — often with androgynous faces — layered paintings and installations that radiate a quiet, timeless intensity. They balance between the familiar and the uncanny and force you to look more closely: what do you actually see? In his work bronze can appear as wet clay or a wooden plank, a forgotten myth is distorted, and furniture is shown at 88 per cent of its real size. Manders uses language as a starting point and composes, with materials and objects, sentences whose meaning only partly reveals itself.

    Mark Manders: ‘I am interested in the strength and the vulnerability of our thinking, in the fact that we, as thinking beings, are susceptible to errors of thought, neuroses – and also to hope.’

    A journey into the imagination
    In Mindstudy Mark Manders invites you to follow him through the spaces of his thinking. At Voorlinden he constructs a living room, a bathroom, factories and studio spaces — and to do so, the museum’s interior is substantially reworked. He starts on the estate and inside the museum, he redirects the entrance into his exhibition. There unfolds a world of frozen thoughts and arrested moments. There is no chronological ordering: early work may look recent, while other pieces have the aura of an archaeological artefact. Subtle connections and echoes arise between the works, which link to and refer to one another. One example is the monumental installation Room With Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionaries, in which painted dictionaries fall onto collages of newspapers that contain every English word, while — as the title reveals — three dead birds are hidden.

    A writer with objects
    At the age of eighteen Mark Manders decided to become a writer. Not with words, but with objects. Since then he has been steadily working on his life’s work Self-Portrait as Building — an imaginary construction in which sculptures, paintings, installations, drawings, publications and graphic works function as frozen thoughts and actions. Manders studied at the Arnhem Academy of Art and settled in Ronse, Belgium, in 2005. The Dutch artist received early international recognition, exhibiting at Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), in the Dutch pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and in museums and galleries from New York to Japan and from Brazil to Germany. In 2017 he realised a permanent fountain on the Rokin in Amsterdam. Voorlinden has maintained a close relationship with the artist for decades and now owns more than a dozen of his works.