ROTTERDAM.- On Labor Day, Friday May 1, three exhibitions opened at TENT: the Priscila Fernandes solo exhibition; a fictional and temporary museum curated by TENT Curatorial Fellow Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender“; and Eva Olthof presents an installation based on Berlin’s first public academic library.

Priscila Fernandes
Those bastards in caps come to have fun and relax by the seaside instead of continuing to work in the factory.
This solo exhibition of Priscila Fernandes brings together a selection of her most recent installations and newly developed work. Fernandes (b. 1981, Portugal, based in Rotterdam) questions the influence of artistic processes such as creativity and non-conformism in education, labor and play and how these are used for both practical and ideological purposes. For The Book of Aesthetic Education of the Modern School (2014), Fernandes transforms TENT’s main room into an installation with a double function: it is both an artwork and a temporary classroom. The installation, inspired by the radical ideas of the Escuela Moderna (Modern School, Barcelona 1901–06), features Fernandes’s book ¿Y El Arte?, which sheds light on the different debates that could have formed part of the Escuela Moderna pedagogical doctrine in relation to art. The book raises questions about art and education, and the role of art in shaping a new society. In collaboration with Fernandes, Piet Zwart Institute’s Master of Education in Arts will use the facilities for workshops, student meetings and a number of public lectures in order to map the field in which educators, curators and artists move.

The title of Fernandes’s solo exhibition refers to a French newspaper article from 1936 and to Fernandes’s interest in questions pertaining to the relationship between labor and leisure time in our highly productive society. Fascinated by the rational painting technique of French pointillists derived from their anarchist ideals, Fernandes dissects the foundations of their visual language in a series of photographs and paintings. The themes in the work of the Neo-Impressionists changed gradually from the depiction of urban social issues to painting idyllic landscapes in the coastal towns of the Mediterranean. This development anticipates the rise of mass tourism and changing notions of labor and leisure. What is the position of art and the artist in shaping society, and how do society and its values influence the works of artists?

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
Haris Epaminonda, Yoeri Guépin, Tim Hollander, Hannah James, Simon Kentgens, Una Knox, Wesley Meuris, Ieva Misevičiūtė, Mandla Reuter, Wouter Sibum
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (The MoUS) is a temporary fictional museum at TENT that redistributes the hierarchies between artwork and the objects that make their presentation possible. The group exhibition lends its framework from the prologue to the eponymous novel by Dubravka Ugrešić from 1998. The text puts forward a situation in which a number of objects come together coincidentally due to the healthy appetite of a walrus in the Berlin zoo. In the book, the objects function as both actors and props: they make the story possible, but simultaneously remain silently present in the background.

With this prologue as a point of departure, The MoUS exhibits a diverse range of artistic practices concerning the material and written language of an exhibition within an institutional context. Temporary walls, press releases, plants, work descriptions, plinths, projectors and sockets move to the foreground; guiding objects that inform the vocabulary of an exhibition, yet tend to be withheld from sight and thought to the audience, as “support structures” and “carriers” of a work. Ultimately, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender aims to open a space in which we can face the object on an equal footing, making the persistent relationships between objects en subjects ambiguous, towards an idea of objects as partners in our daily working and living practices.The MoUS consists of a group exhibition, lectures, a museum night and publication, in which the experience of the exhibited objects to the audience is put to the test. Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is TENT’s 2015 Curatorial Fellow.

Project presentation: Eva Olthof: In der Freihand
Where is history “made?” Inspired by this question Eva Olthof has worked since 2010 on projects in which she researches certain events or locations through testimonials and documentation. She collects fragments, photographs (both taken by herself and found), archival material, texts and objects, searching for the boundaries between the documentary and imaginary image. Olthof will present an installation at TENT in which her new publication Return to Rightful Owner plays a central role. The politics of forgetting, remembering and citing, is the central theme of the book, which takes the origination of the Amerika-Gedenkblibliothek in Berlin as its starting point. This public academic library, modeled after the Public Library, was opened in 1954 as a gift from the American people to the population of West Berlin.