FRAME OF MIND

20 November – 17 December 2015

Pierfrancesco Gava & Mehmet Ögüt

moderated by Rob Ritzen

Frame of Mind wants to reflect on how people take part in discourses of power. Power not so much understood as coercive, but rather as the exchange of acts that reproduce an order or imply a certain worldview, such as language, speech, memories, images, habits and embodiment. What are the different ways and degrees in which you and I are embedded in this open scenario and what role do we play? How are the narratives provided by media, religion, and politics enacted by their main proponents?

The artistic research and practices of Pierfrancesco Gava and Mehmet Ögüt explore these themes in different ways.

Mehmet Ögüt has a very personal approach to the histories and narratives he explores. A documentary about the translator of the book Turks Fruit in Turkish, for example, is not merely a portrait, but an impression of Dutch and Turkish society.

Pierfrancesco Gava, on the other hand, researches the role that is played by the major actors in the play of politics. That is to say their images, because that’s how these roles are played in contemporary politics. What is the relation, for example, between the words spoken in a speech and the person who articulates these words and performs the speech? How are the Pope and Obama unique and yet very similar?

Together, Pierfrancesco Gava, Mehmet Ögüt and moderator Rob Ritzen reflect on the different forms and representations of discourses of power, how these can be analysed and communicated, but above all, questioned.

Pierfrancesco Gava is an Italian artist based in Amsterdam. He studied History of Art at the University of Florence and came to Holland with a scholarship to write his thesis. He graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2010 and from the Master Artistic Research programme at the Royal Academy in The Hague in 2015.

Mehmet Ögüt lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Since 2013, he studies at Marmara University of Fine Arts Department, Master Programme. He did an Erasmus exchange programme in Holland at the Royal Academy in Den Hague 2014-2015. He was awarded the ESSL Art Award Cee 2015 in Istanbul. He mainly works with video art. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he likes the viewer to become part of his art as an added component.

Rob Ritzen is a philosopher and curator living in Brussels. He is a candidate PhD researcher in political philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Beside many solo exhibitions, he curated group exhibitions such as When Squares [Re]Frame Meaning; The Stone that Was a Bone and a series of collaborative exhibitions under the title We Tell Stories – An Anthology.

De kijkdoos [de kɛɪkdos]: a craft box that can be used to create a virtual diorama. A viewer, through which one person at a time can see an image.

Since 2010, DE KIJKDOOS public space is used to expose imaginative, absurd and intelligent ideas to a broad public. It is a cultural cabinet that engages in collaborative cultural production and artistic research of any kind.

From 2015 September, DE KIJKDOOS project space is a new platform where stories on cultural narratives, history and collective memory are shared with the public in a dialogue between contemporary art from Turkey and the Netherlands in Amsterdam. We are interested in how stories are communicated with the public in contemporary art.