2020 – CEAC

Rolling Snowball 13, Djupivogur, 2020

root — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 22:32:01 +0000

Opening

July 11 at 3 PM, 2020

Duration

July 11 till August 15, 2020

Location

Bræðslan, Víkurland 6, 765 Djúpivogur, Iceland

Artist

Welcome to the Rolling Snowball 13, Djupivogur. Featuring the seventh collaboration between the Chinese European Art Center and the Municipality of Djupivogur in Iceland, this exhibition is also a record for this special year 2020.
In this exhibition we are proud to show the works of 20 young Icelandic artists who are (most of them) taking their first steps in the professional art world. Besides them we also show 10 artists from China, Holland and Iceland. We have found Kristin Dagmar Johannesdottir willing to be the curator for this edition of the Snowball and are thankful to her.

Over the past months (and even still) the world is confronted with huge challenges: Behavior is restricted, physical distance is required, relationships are redefined, and the inherent situation is changing rapidly, the various “new normal” make us feel the necessity to be closely connected, to learn from each other, to improve ourselves or increase our capacity as global think tank for each other.

Despite the uncertainties and devastating occurrences hope always exists and therefore after a careful consideration we have decided to do the Rolling Snowball exhibition as scheduled within the limits that the circumstances allow.

Finally, we would like to thank all the friends who participate in this project and the Municipality of Djupivogur. We hope that all of you will stay healthy and we are looking forwards to see you all again.

Participating artists: Alexander Hugo Gunnarsson, Andri Þór Arason, Anika L. Baldursdóttir, Atli Pálsson, Auðunn Kvaran, Birkir Mar Hjaltested, Bjargey Ólafsdóttir, Clare Aimée Gossen, Daníel Ágúst Ágústsson, Einar Lúðvík Ólafsson, Hrafnkell Sigurðsson, Huang Shizun黄仕尊, Jóhanna Margrétardóttir, Kjáni Thorlacius, Lin Jing林婧, Liu Yuanyuan刘圆圆, Lova Y余立尧 & Tycho Hupperets, Margrét Dúadóttir Landmark, María Lind Baldursdóttir, Marike Schuurman,
Rakel Andrésdóttir, Renate Feizaka, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Sólbjört Vera Ómarsdóttir,
Sölvi Steinn Þórhallsson, Tara & Silla, Wei Na维娜, Yang Zhiqian阳芷倩, Ye Qianfu叶倩甫,
Þór Vigfússon.

May Lee, director
Ineke Gudmundsson, Senior director
Annelie Musters, CEAC Platform Netherland

so far

root — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 08:36:05 +0000

Opening

June 13 at 5 PM, 2020

Duration

June 13 till July 28, 2020

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Hester Oerlemans

Marike Schuurman

An exhibition of new sculptures by Hester Oerlemans and photography by Marike Schuurman at the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen, made during a residency originally scheduled to take place from December 2019 to March 2020. The residency’s duration doubled due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent, repeated cancellation of the artists’ flights.

Marike Schuurman is showing the new series ‘Hougu’ and a dummy for the book ‘Xiamen Portraits,’ both resulted from photographing at the seaside of Xiamen. Hester Oerlemans’ new sculptures provide a sequel to her previous exhibition in Xiamen, ‘Fixing Air’, for which she investigated how one might use air to sculpt in three dimensions. Her latest sculptures consist of stacked Blobs (2020) that stand freely in the gallery space.

The two artists also collaborated on a project called ‘Battle Banners’ (2020), which began when they discovered that WeChat’s translation function serves not only to translate text but also to save translated images as photos. Schuurman and Oerlemans used the app to photograph almost 300 Chinese banners in Xiamen, half of which ended up in a publication that they will present alongside framed polaroids of the banners.

Furthermore, Oerlemans’ catalogue ‘Fixing Air’ will be presented, as a reflection of her recent exhibition, including a text by British-American curator Isabel Parkes.

This residency and project are made possible by the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou.

Gallery

Fixing Air

root — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:06:02 +0000

Opening

April 11 at 4 PM, 2020

Duration

April 11 till June 6, 2020

Location

CEAC, Xiamen, China

Artist

Hester Oerlemans

For most of the last decade, Hester Oerlemans has been trying to fix air. Moved by the impossibility of finding form for the intangible and by a longstanding interest in the transformation of one medium to another, the Dutch artist has arrived at a series of quixotic yet critical sculptures.

Oerlemans’shiny Blobs(2020) are both bodily and abstract, an index of the invisible. Highly individualized through color and shape, they bulge irregularly and suggest both containment and expansion, control and release. The irreducible tension arises as much from the artist’s process as from her playful sense of paradox. Each sculpture begins with balloons, which Oerlemans inflates with guidance from a balloon expert. These interstitial balloon assemblages are then laboriously inserted into a larger balloon that is itself already filled with air, which is subsequently removed with a vacuum in order to finalize a form. A studied technique of blowing, sucking and knotting results in a balloons-within-a-balloon form that appears by turns familiar and unsettling. From here, Oerlemans repeatedly pours epoxy resin over the forms, reinforcing some with fiberglass and using liquid to convert rubber and air into a thin but durable layer. The balloons inside eventually deflate, releasing their air into the Blob and leaving viewers to wonder at an empty carapace, abandoned by hands that might never have been there at all.

Through the Blob sculptures and the also balloon-based Sausage series (2020),the artist experiments at the intersection of fine and applied arts. She relies on a honed understanding of both fields in order to poetically and humorously interrogate how objects inform engagement with our environments. At times, her gestures are remarkably simple: tying the ends of an elongated balloon or, in the case of SEAT (2017), heating a small plastic chair to bend it into a form that resembles the beak of a well-known cartoon character. At a moment in which minimalism has been coopted as a corporate aesthetic that encourages people to increase consumption under the guise of consuming less, Oerlemans interrupts such ideas that less is more, form follows function, or that “transparent” design has nothing to hide. As decent air quality and financial health become baseline demand sofa hyper-connected, global population, Oerlemans gestures to the unseen forces that shape our world. If at first glance the Blobs appear as harmless, discarded charms– at second, they become the hollow relics of a precarious era defined by the inflation and deflation of intangible assets.

Fixing air is a fool’s errand, but one that Oerlemans pursues to a serious end. The
resulting sculptures reflect on both a universal resource that we can neither own
nor live without, as well as on the desires that fuel an insatiable economy, many of
which have no real substance at all.

Isabel Parkes, March 2020