IIn football, there is a “fake nine”, a tactical variation of a center forward. He moves chaotically on the pitch, and even dives occasionally, but suddenly appears in front of the goal-and it is difficult to control. If there is a “false two” in a large-scale regular exhibition, it is the Sonsbeek Biennale in disguise, named after the park in Arnhem: the open-air exhibition started in 1949, earlier than the Kassel Documenta, and a few days earlier than the Munster sculpture The ten-year project was about to emerge and immediately attracted 125,000 visitors when it debuted. Sonsbeek started as a biennale, but quickly slowed down to a triennial in order to completely break away from 1958, as it did in 1971, 1986, and 1993, and then in 2001, 2008, and 2016.
Such a chaotic cycle cannot justify continuous discourse, which is why the public space art exhibition is repositioning itself as a four-year exhibition-of course, not without adding another rather unusual accent to the agenda: twelfth The edition is also the thirteenth. It can be said to be a double edition: “Sonsbeek 2020/2024”. Due to the corona, this year had to be postponed; its support plan will be held in the city in the next four years, and there are certain ambitions in order to more deeply position the exhibition theme on the scene. It sounds like a plan.
Today the wealth of the exhibition center comes from Suriname
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Berlin curator, as the designated person in charge of the Berlin House of Culture, has recently been a highly sought after exhibition organizer and has been commissioned to manage it. Cameroonians have a certain sense of the origin of the prosperity emanating from the spacious public garden behind the main train station, and they have studied in White Villas and Zypendaal Huis-their owners are among the winners of the late trading power. During the golden age, they became rich by processing sugar, tobacco, and coffee from many Dutch colonies. In the archives of the Zypendaal family, Ndikung and his team found a doctor’s bill. A slave was expelled from the Vossenberg plantation in Suriname to Arnhem in 1727 and was listed in one of the few documents in which she existed As “Zwarte Anna”. Little is known about her existence, and the “Black Archives” in Amsterdam roughly reconstructed the ownership structure of the unknown slave laborer: until her death on December 22, 1780, Anna ran two families in Sonsbeck Park.
The theme of this exhibition is compactly equipped with about 35 works, with their destiny as the theme: the focus is on work and exploitation under the sign of discrimination. Several artists dedicated their works to Anna. Alida Ymele clearly shows her life today in a series of portraits. She shows young women cleaning with rubber gloves, washing dishes, holding brooms and mops in their hands: fancy contrast, Fancy irony. The painter who lives in Douala, Cameroon has placed a grid behind her protagonist—a grid of modernism, which represents progress in Western art and has become a prison.
Right next to the Zypendaal villa where Anna lived and worked in a forced diaspora in the 18th century, Farkhondeh Shahroudi dedicated a flying flag to her—the Iranian living in Berlin expressed Her red banner of solidarity with serfs showed her a huge ball, a global dimension from the carpet to their illegal destination.
Sonsbeek meets today’s expectations of the biennale by giving art specific functions. It involves capturing social crises such as colonialism and racism in images and effectively communicating them to the outside world when necessary. Just like Olu Oguibe won the Arnold Bode Prize at the 2017 Documenta for his controversial obelisk in Kassel: in cities and parks, he placed the neon sign “Sex work is honest work” , It shows its effect in the dark. Trips to remote satellite locations have been rewarded by works such as Hira Nabi’s brilliant film about migrant workers who demolished a huge oil tanker at a shipyard in Baluchistan, Pakistan, and Nader Mohamed · Nader Mohamed Saadallah (Nader Mohamed Saadallah) records the founders of Egyptian steel, they are almost engaged in ancient work and are not protected by local standards. Sonsbeek shines at Kröller-Müller-Museum in Otterlo: there is a small temporary exhibition dedicated to Stanley Brouwn, a Dutch conceptual artist with Surinamese descent.
Okwui Enwezor’s seminal exhibition “Short Century”, which began in 2001, has become a distant memory on the (hypothetical) freedom and independence of the African continent, when it was impressive in a trapped villa in Munich. What is disturbing is that the main theme of this exhibition still exists-all conflicts caused by colonialism are also retained in contemporary art for further reflection.
Force time distance: On labor and its sonic ecology. In Arnhem and other places; until August 29. The catalog price is 35 euros.
