Programme produced on the occasion of Playbill Act II: Moniek Toebosch at Torpedo Theatre, Amsterdam June 24, 2022.

Directly engaging with the theatrical setting of Torpedo Theater, the forty-five short texts composing theater-maker, artist, educator and broadcaster Moniek Toebosch’s 1994 work Kop op Kop [Head to Head] were performed as a one-person play by television and radio presenter Adeline van Lier. First exhibited as part of the Stedelijk Museum’s 1994 exhibition Couplet 3, the work—for which Toebosch wrote monologues and poems to accompany a selection of portraits held in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection—is one of many pieces produced by Toesbosch that interweave text with performance and/or its implications.

Designed by Maud Vervenne.

A descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples, much of Dale Harding’s multilayered practice is motivated by the cultural inheritances of his families, who originate in the Fitzroy Basin and the sandstone belt of central Queensland. Harding’s works pay homage to the stories and presence of matrilineal figures in his family.

Produced to accompany an exhibition of the same title at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney, Through a lens of visitation specifically explores the artist’s relationship to his mother’s Country of Carnarvon Gorge and documents a major new commission and first-time collaboration with his mother Kate Harding. A textile artist, who since 2008 has employed quilt-making to tell her stories of family, culture and Country, Kate Harding’s quilts are presented alongside painterly responses undertaken by Dale Harding across various mediums.

Edited by Hannah Mathews and Dale Harding. Designed by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen.

First Edition of Yayoi Kusama’s first novel, published in Japan in 1978 and never translated into English, is best described as a faux autobiography, describing Kusama’s years in New York in the 50s and 60s. Having left behind a strict family life in post-war Japan, Kusama entered a period of heightened creativity. She was free to make what she wanted, but plagued by fears of intimacy and inadequacy. Her art became a form of therapy, and she went on to create a unique body of work that not only parallels and transcends Pop art, Minimal art and Happenings of the ’60s, but remains influential today.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Edition of 80 copies signed and numbered by the artist, plus 8 artist’s proofs.

道具 / Tool consists of a set of four printed images of forks (two made of silver, two of plastic). Dramatically enlarged and slightly deformed, the utensils stand against a black background, strongly affirming their presence—until they are folded and put back in their custom-made box.

As in some of her previous works, Batia Suter is dealing here with typology and objecthood. These four images—which the artist photographed from her own collection of absurd cutlery—look like samples from a kitchenware catalogue focusing as much on the common features of forks as on their potential deformities and eccentricities. Recalling Karl Blossfeldt’s close-up photographs of plants, they highlight the specificity and variety of forms hidden in ordinary things, as well as the strange, almost threatening nature of these “predatory” tools.

A project by Will Brown. Text by Jean Conner. Photographs by Jason Fulford.

Artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner’s (1933–2008) mobility was severely limited for the last five years of his life, when he rarely left the San Francisco home he shared with his wife, Jean. To aid in his physical navigation of its spaces, he worked with assistants to install a succession of solid brass handles in each and every room—surrounding the stove, down the boat-like stairwell, inside the recesses of the bedroom closet. At last count, the handles, a labyrinth of critical support, numbered 163. Still in situ after his death in 2008, the handles are arguably Conner’s last great work—at once physical and metaphysical, fragmentary and elusive, elegant and anonymous.

Will Brown is a collaborative project founded by Lindsey White, Jordan Stein and David Kasprzak.