Lennart Creutzburg, Papaver Pollution, 2023
Mixed media installation: sculpture, moving image, color filtered windows, residu
Thomas Swinkels, Studio, 2023
UIT
ZICHT, 2023
Residency + duo-exhibition
26.06.-09.07.23 - Kunstpodium T, Tilburg (NL)
Curated and produced by Julia Fidder and Myriam Gras.
Participating artists: Thomas Swinkels Lennart Creutzberg.
The classic image of the tourist - equipped with camera including neck cord, selfie stick at the ready and preferably wearing white socks in sandals - can now be found almost everywhere. With a sharp eye, the tourist scans his surroundings to understand and interpret the new, unfamiliar place. In a way, the contemporary artist moves about in the same way as the tourist. Both the artist and the tourist have the ability to reformulate the already curated environments they visit. Retrieved information and experiences
are transformed into narratives that are often distorted, exaggerated and fragmented.
Philosopher Hiroki Azuma calls these tourist excesses the Postal Multitude; a situation consisting of multiple forms of misdelivery - information twisted in successive stages. This inauthentic experience is what benefits the artist in their practice - their work possesses the potential to make us imagine other realities.
In the duo exhibition UIT
ZICHT - the artist as tourist curators Julia Fidder and Myriam Gras invite artists Lennart Creutzburg and Thomas Swinkels to temporarily return to their former hometown of Tilburg from abroad. The exhibition will show work resulting from a working period at Kunstpodium T and recent works created in various locations in Europe. A subsequent publication reflects on the role of the artist as tourist within the itinerant existence of contemporary making.
Publication: The Artist as Tourist
‘Uitzicht’, freely translated from Dutch to ‘out of sight’ or, an outlook, view or perspective.
UIT
ZICHT - the artist as tourist, is an exhibition that merges these opposing tropes - of not knowing or seeing and the act of generating new information and ways of perceiving. This concept shows both sides of movement, that of the place left behind and the place of arrival - formulated through the figure of the tourist. More specifically, the artist as tourist. Deriving from the philosophical framework of the Japanese literary critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma in Philosophy of the Tourist, we propose a rethinking of moving in relation to tourism. Modern thinkers have tended to scoff at the movements of the tourist and its being as a figure of homogenising globalism; the tourist has become the epitome of how different cultures are transforming and becoming more and more alike. As the figure moves around, spending a relatively short amount of time at a place or site, it scans and observes its surroundings and curates its story before distributing it to their network, who on their end receive a collection of fragmented experiences and already translated or interpreted information. The artist itself moves in similar ways, duplicating fragmented layers of a specific site in its practice while finding ways of moving forward in today's world.
This essay focuses on both the artist and the tourist. We explore where these figures intersect and where they differ from each other. We want to illustrate how the behaviours of the tourist or the postal multitude can possibly change narratives embedded in specific locations, by highlighting different elements. It offers an alternative understanding of being in and moving through today's globalised landscape.
UIT
ZICHT - the artist as tourist, is an exhibition that merges these opposing tropes - of not knowing or seeing and the act of generating new information and ways of perceiving. This concept shows both sides of movement, that of the place left behind and the place of arrival - formulated through the figure of the tourist. More specifically, the artist as tourist. Deriving from the philosophical framework of the Japanese literary critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma in Philosophy of the Tourist, we propose a rethinking of moving in relation to tourism. Modern thinkers have tended to scoff at the movements of the tourist and its being as a figure of homogenising globalism; the tourist has become the epitome of how different cultures are transforming and becoming more and more alike. As the figure moves around, spending a relatively short amount of time at a place or site, it scans and observes its surroundings and curates its story before distributing it to their network, who on their end receive a collection of fragmented experiences and already translated or interpreted information. The artist itself moves in similar ways, duplicating fragmented layers of a specific site in its practice while finding ways of moving forward in today's world.
This essay focuses on both the artist and the tourist. We explore where these figures intersect and where they differ from each other. We want to illustrate how the behaviours of the tourist or the postal multitude can possibly change narratives embedded in specific locations, by highlighting different elements. It offers an alternative understanding of being in and moving through today's globalised landscape.
Thomas Swinkels, Studio, 2023