Following endless digital threads of information and being in constant touch with ‘hardware,’ it is easy to forget one’s bodily presence and situatedness. Weavings, just like computer coding, are complex automated nettings. Only the point of rupture—a dropped stitch, like a bug in the code, a systemic error—redirects the attention outside of the machine by requesting a manual intervention.

To experience a gesture of repair and an analogue form of ‘networking,’ as a literal and tactile activity, we initiated two hole mending meditations conducted online, with participants at home, to relax the senses while focusing on fixing holes in garments and touching soft textiles. To feel the impact each detail has on a structure as a whole: disruptions in the weave of a garment cause holes to grow. By tracing the dropped stitches and patching up obvious ‘bugs,’ we remediate and re-activate unappreciated clothes without erasing traces of our bodies inhabiting them.

Produced on the occasion of gerlach en koop, Was machen Sie um zwei? Ich schlafe, at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 19 September 2020–28 February, 2021. In an exhibition at the edge of sleep gerlach en koop display works by Ismaïl Bahri, Kasper Bosmans, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Mark Geffriaud, Voebe de Gruyter, Ian Kiaer, Kitty Kraus, Gabriel Kuri, Rita McBride, Guy Mees, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Helen Mirra, Laurent Montaron, Melvin Moti, Jean-Luc Moulène, Henrik Olesen, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Emilio Prini, Bojan Šarčević, Shimabuku, Steve Van den Bosch, and a contribution by writer Haytham El-Wardany

Available to download here.

Produced on the occasion of Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s residency and subsequent exhibition Sour Gnossiennes at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, 23 August–25 October, 2020.

During her six-month stay in Mönchengladbach, the artist developed a new body of work that consists of a series of drawings. The exhibition title refers to the small, poetic piano pieces by the French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Their melancholic mood reminds Evelyn Taocheng Wang of people quietly waiting for their bus on a grey and rainy day.

Produced on the occasion of the awarding of the ABN AMRO Art Prize to Evelyn Taocheng Wang and the subsequent exhibition Het bloemblaadje, dat tijdens het ochtendkrieken was gevallen, paktte ik op in de avondschemering, which has a purposefully included typo and is a quote she translated from a book by Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) about his childhood home, a source of memories to him.

For the exhibition Wang made eight new paintings and a series of drawings and paintings on rice paper, including one drawing of more than seven meters long. Central are the customs and practices in Dutch culture, symbolized by Wang, among other things, by oliebollen.

Designed by Irma Boom.

With translations by Galina Rymbu, Georgia Sagri, Elena Narbutaitė, Freya Choi, Jakob Kolding.

Valzhyna Mort’s Guest in translation initiates a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.

With translations by Kirill Mededev, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri, Fernanda Brenner, Monika Szewczyk, Alix Eynaudi, Iman Issa, Natasha Ginwala.

Jericho Brown’s Duplex in translation is the second book in a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.