“Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation”- James Turrell-

From the end of May till June, Cinema Sunset will be screening five must-see classics from famous cinematographers that applied revolutionary lighting techniques. The program consists of five films in which light plays an integral part in enhancing the movie’s overall imagery. Starting from the early 40’s up to the mid 70’s, several lighting techniques will be reviewed. The screenings will start around sunset after a short introduction. So bring your little candles and your friends to settle down for the evening…

program
17 May 2013 | 20.30 | Day of Wrath
24 May 2013 | 20.30 | Strangers on a Train
31 May 2013 | 20.30 | In Cold Blood
7 June 2013 | 20.30 | The Conformist
14 June 2013 | 20.30 | Mean Streets

17 May 2013 | 20.30 – 22.30
Day of Wrath
Release: 1943
Runtime: 97 min
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Director of Photography: Karl Andersson
Cast: Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Anna Svierkier

Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) follows a witch hunt in a Danish village in 1623. The parson’s wife, Anne, is trying to protect an old woman accused of witchcraft which doesn’t go without consequences for herself. At a slow and lingering pace the film sketches a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Dreyer characteristically combines measured pace, long, horizontal pans and close-ups of faces with high contrast lighting and intense acting. Day of Wrath is shot in 1943 in occupied Denmark. The film is often understood as an allegory of the fascist regime, although Dreyer himself has always denied this.

24 May 2013 | 20.30 – 22.30
Strangers on a train
Release: 1951
Runtime: 101 min
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Director of Photography: Robert Burks
Cast: Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker

Guy Haines, a well-known tennis star that wants to divorce his wife Miriam, meets a rich and strange young man Bruno Anthony on a short train trip. The psychotic Bruno confronts Guy with a theory on how two complete strangers can get away with murder. His plan is relatively simple: the two strangers each agree to kill someone the other person wants disposed of. Guy mockingly dismisses the plan, but has to deal with Bruno’s mad ravings when Miriam is found dead. Robert Burks, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work for Strangers on a train, was Hitchcock’s favorite cinematographer. Strangers on a train was their first joint project. From this developed one of Hollywood’s most inspired collaborations, as well as a close personal friendship.

1 June 2013 | 20.30 – 23.00
In Cold Blood
Release: 1967
Runtime: 134 min
Director: Richard Brooks
Director of Photography: Conrad L. Hall
Cast: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe

Two ex-prisoners break into a wealthy farmer’s home to rob the family of their money. When they find out there isn’t any, they kill the entire family to avoid identification. When the police trace the men down, they both seem to have a completely different memory of the crime they had committed. Pending their trial they confess their own version of the truth. The film In Cold Blood was based on a book by Truman Capote. Critics regard the book as a pioneering work of the true crime genre. The outstanding work of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall was nominated for an academy award.

8 June 2013 | 20.30 – 22.30
The Conformist
Release: 1970
Runtime: 111 min
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Director of Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda

The conformist is Marcello Clerici, who is aching to ‘fit in’ in 1930’s Rome. Marcello agrees to kill a political refugee, on orders from the Fascist government, even though the victim-to-be is his college professor. The film is a character study of the kind of person who willingly “conforms” to the ideological fashions of his day. The screenplay is based on the novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The Conformist is the first film in which Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro collaborated, followed later by many noteworthy films such as Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. Storaro is widely regarded as a master cinematographer. He is inspired by Goethe’s theory of colors, which focuses in part on the psychological effects that different colors have and the way in which colors influence our perceptions of different situations.

14 June 2013 | 20.30 – 22.30
Mean Streets
Release: 1973
Runtime: 112 min
Director: Martin Scorsese
Director of Photography: Kent L. Wakefield
Cast: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval

Mean Streets is set in the Seventies in New York’s neigbourhood Little Italy. Much of the film’s street-wise dialogue comes from Scorsee’s encouragment of improvisation. The storyline focuses on Charlie Cappa a small time collector for his Uncle Giovanni. Charlie has taken personal responsibility for Johnny Boy, an anarchistic simple-minded hothead who is in financial troubles. Meanwhile Charlie maintains a secret love affair with his epileptic cousin Theresa.The cinematographer Kent Wakeford shot the film using handheld camera techniques and using innovative lighting, both of which have been very influential afterwards in American filmmaking.

The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73) is probably best known for being a founding member of the CoBrA group (1948-51) and Internationale Situationniste (from 1957-1961). It is less well known that he also wrote over 1000 books, articles and other texts in which he discussed art theory, philosophy, architecture and many other subjects. Jorn’s writings were an attempt to develop “a complete revision of the existing philosophical system” from the perspective of an artist.

Hilde de Bruijn (NL, 1971), freelance curator, and a curator at the Cobra Museum for Modern Art, will introduce Jorn’s outspoken thinking that allowed permanent dimensions of irony, pragmatism, playfulness, craving for disruption, synthesis and free-association. This is the public platform for her curatorial research into Asger Jorn, exploring what Jorn’s boundless energy, his believe in art and creativity as integral part of life, his critical questions, underminings and suggested alternatives to the existing can mean to us today.

Smack in the middle of Rotterdam’s two annual international mega-events; the Film Festival and the Marathon, we host our very own screening marathon on the 5th of April, starting at 18:00 until around midnight.

The screening includes three recent films directed by three amazingly talented women from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The films will be screened back-to-back.

Popcorn will be provided by the ADA-team, as well as the occasional game of table tennis for leg stretching.

We hope you can join us.

On Sunday the 24th of March, ADA hosted the open reading This Book is a Classroom. The afternoon was based on the publication We would like to learn and are working on a book… edited by Lucie Kolb, Romy Rüegger, HIT Studio Berlin and Passenger Books.

The publication asks questions about the conditions, politics, performativities and intersubjectivities of knowledge production in the art world. The publication is a continuation of a series of lectures, lecture performances and seminars that Lucie Kolb and Romy Rüegger have been organizing in the framework of With With since 2009 in Zürich.

For the reading in ADA we invited a small group of interdisciplinary readers to respond to four chapters of the book that reflect on forms of education, knowledge exchange and self-organised structures that support it. The responses could take any form such as writing, visual, performance, etc. Through these contributions our aim was to ‘re-read’ the publication and discuss its content and associated thoughts.

Some of the responses can be read and viewed here

On 9 December ADA organizes the third edition of Breakfast at Noon at L40 Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz eV in Berlin. Breakfast at Noon is a series of thematic encounters for which ADA invites guests to present and discuss their work with an audience around a breakfast table. The guests are invited for the specific position they take through their work and the way in which they structure their working processes.

Each breakfast session reflects on questions that come forward from the practice of the invited guests. For this session at L40, ADA will present their own practice next to the practices of the two, artist initiated, collaborative practices of Oda Projesi and ABA, Air Berlin Alexanderplatz. Each initiative will give a brief presentation about their group’s structure and practice as a collaborative endeavor and we will discuss notions of hospitality, ethics and otherness through looking at the multiple approaches that groups working together have adapted in their working processes.

Oda Projesi
Oda Projesi is an artist collective based in Istanbul and composed of three members, Seçil Yersel, Özge Açıkkol and Güneş Savaş, who turned their collaboration into an art project in 2000. The project members met in 1997 and decided to rent and share an apartment as a studio. Although not intended, the apartment they rented in Galata eventually evolved into a multi-purpose, private and public place. Oda Projesi works with different tools and strategies; working with “neighbours” and with people from different disciplines.

ABA
ABA is an‘artist-in-residency’ based in the centre of Berlin and offering very personal and time-intensive support to its residents. It was founded in 2009 by Susanne Kriemann and Aleksander Komarov. ABA has three team members whom all have had a wide variety of experiences in the field of artist-in-residency-programs.

Please Note: You are kindly requested to reserve a seat by mailing us before the 7th of December. The breakfast will take place at L40 Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz eV on Linienstraße 40. There will be a maximum of 25 people who can attend. Food and drinks will be served during the breakfast.

On 25 November ADA organizes the second edition of Breakfast at Noon at Kunstvlaai 2012. Breakfast at Noon is a series of thematic encounters for which ADA invites guests to present and discuss their work with an audience around a breakfast table. The guests are invited for the specific position they take through their work and the way in which they structure their working processes.

Each breakfast session reflects on questions that come forward from the practice of the invited guests. For this session at Kunstvlaai the two collaborative research based initiatives Public Space With a Roof and 98weeks will give a brief presentation of their work and we will discuss multiple approaches that groups working together have adapted in their working processes, as well as work ethics and the role of audience participation.

Public Space With a Roof (PSWAR) was founded in 2003 and started by organizing projects in their gallery space at Overtoom 301 in Amsterdam. The space was initiated as a research and a project space with the aim to enable artists to develop and present their ideas, realize collaborative projects and to engage in critical discourse. Since 2007 the gallery has been closed and PSWAR now develops new projects, which are hosted by different institutions in the Netherlands and abroad. The current members of PSWAR are Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander and Vesna Madzoski.

98weeks, founded by Marwa Arsanios and Mirene Arsanios in 2007, is an artist’s initiative running a non-profit project space in Beirut. 98weeks is conceived as a research project, that shifts its attention to a new topic every 98 weeks. Focusing on artistic research, combining both theoretical and practical forms of inquiry, their projects take multiple forms such as workshops, community projects and seminars, reading groups, publications and exhibitions.

Please Note: You are kindly requested to reserve a seat by mailing us. The breakfast will take place at the Conversation Corner during Kunstvlaai in Amsterdam. There will me a maximum of 25 people who can attend. There will be food and drinks served during the breakfast. Please note that you need to buy a ticket for the Kunstvlaai festival.

As part of its long-term investigation into collaborative and participatory practices, ADA will continue its research in Berlin in two parts. Firstly, by activating six reading sessions in which different texts will be discussed and secondly by organizing two, semi-public breakfast sessions with two members of ADA and selected participants from Berlin and abroad

During these six sessions, texts reflecting on artistic production, modes of communication, political positioning and the meaning produced will be jointly and actively explored in a friendly and relaxed environment. Each ADA member selected a text from a personal/ artistic position, which reflects on the subject of collaboration and collectivity. The texts were selected in dialogue with the other selected texts, resulting in a connected program.

During the residency we split up the group. This allows for the same text to be read at the same moment at two different locations. With this collective reading exercise, ADA also investigates possibilities of ‘remote collectivity’.

We kindly ask everyone who is interested in participating in the reading group to read the text in advance. Links to the texts can be found below.

Please note: The Reading Group sessions will be announced in more detail via ADA Facebook (Please make sure you like us, if you are interested). Each reading group will take place at a different location. Meeting point for the Berlin Reading Group is in front of the Haus des Lehrers, Alexanderstrasse 9, Berlin. The meeting point for the Rotterdam Reading Group is ADA, Delftsestraat 9, Rotterdam.

The Reading List:

20 September
Production Lines by Irit Rogoff
Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life by Hito Steyerl

11 October
Hostipitality by Jacques Derrida
Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality by Mark W. Westmoreland

25 October
The Gift by Marcel Mauss (selected pages)

15 November On Otherness
Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time
by Dikeç, Mustafa; Clark, Nigel and Barnett, Clive (book chapter)
On belief and Otherness a video lecture by Slavoj Zizek.

25 November
Violence by Slavoj Zizek (Chapter 2 Fear Thy Neigbour as Thyself!)

18 December | 18.30
The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman aka Joreen

ADA has started its residency period at AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz. During the working period at ABA the group is divided into smaller units’ of two members at a time. Each unit stays in the apartment for a period of three weeks. At the start of each third week working period, another ADA member arrives to replace one member of the unit.

ADA will use its (dis-)placement in Berlin as a starting point for the investigation on topics relating to the initiation, the performance of and the congregation around knowledge production. As part of its long-term investigation into collaborative and participatory practices, ADA will continue its research in Berlin in two parts. Firstly, by activating six reading sessions in which different texts will be discussed and secondly by organizing two, semi-public breakfast sessions with two members of ADA and selected participants from Berlin and abroad.

Please join us for welcome drinks with a view, on the coming Sunday, the 9th of September from 12.00 to 15.00 at ABA (10th floor), Alexanderstrasse 13, 10179 Berlin – Alexanderplatz.

For more information about the residency, please go to www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de.

Independent writer Moosje Goosen will lead a writing workshop taking place on three Sunday afternoons in ADA. The workshop is meant for anybody with an interest in writing but might be of specific interest to those artists and curators who use writing as part of their artistic practice.

Dates:
Sunday May 13. 14:00 – 18:00hrs
Sunday May 20. 14:00 – 18:00hrs

Sunday June 17. 13:00 – 19:00hrs (Includes a simple dinner)

As Vladimir Nabokov said in one of his lectures: ‘Literature was not born the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.’ Writing is magic: any child in the process of learning to write the letter Aa Aa Aa, then b, c, and so forth, can easily remind you of this. We tend to forget that each letter was, initially, a drawing, crafted by the movement of our own hands: like any other drawing, these written lines can turn into a window to the world, this one or another.

At the same time, learning to write also means that letters lose their peculiarity, so that the written word is prone to become ‘just another’ outlet of language. In our everyday use of writing (beginning with school assignments, then, in our adult lives, the writing of e-mails, a grocery or to-do list, a message on a sticky note or ‘happy birthday’ on a postcard to an uncle) we learn to forget the pleasure of writing ‘wolf, wolf’, just to see where it – all the possible stories of a wolf – might lead to.

This workshop invites a re-cognition of ‘that crafty feeling’ of writing, as novelist Zadie Smith aptly calls it. By means of hands-on exercises, we will read and write collectively and learn what it – ‘wolf, wolf’ – could possibly mean along the way. After a four-week intermission of individual writing, the third and final session will be used for an in-depth group discussion of texts written by the workshop participants.

There will be a minimum of five and a maximum of eight participants in the writing workshop. Please reserve a place by sending an e-mail by the 1st of May at the latest to Esmé Valk (see contact details below). The cost for the three sessions is €75,-. Bring your own pens.

Moosje Goosen is an independent writer based in Rotterdam. She contributes regularly to Metropolis M and Frieze, and also writes in the framework of art exhibitions and events. She has written for, or in collaboration with a number of artists, such as Sara van der Heide and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, and is a research/writing member of the Uqbar Foundation, initiated by artists Irene Kopelman and Mariana Castillo Deball. For Uqbar, she is currently in the process of developing a book series, titled A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, the first two volumes of which (on phantom limbs and dinosaur fictions, respectively) will appear next year.

Practical Information:
Sunday 13 May 2012 | 14:00 – 18:00
Sunday 20 May 2012 | 14:00 – 18:00
Sunday 17 June 2012 | 13:00 – 19:00 including dinner
ADA studios, Delftsestraat 9-B, Rotterdam

ADA has been invited by independent curator Angela Serino to take part in a series of discussions and events in Kunsthuis SYB as part of her project On residency: an (in)visible production of A.I.R. programmes.

Why do artists choose to take part in a residency? In what ways do the structure of a residency differ from other existing supporting structures for artists, such as the gallery, the project space, the academy or the studio? How can a residency contribute to the development of artists today? Over the coming six weeks, these and other questions will be the focus of the programme On Residency or an (in)visible production, put together by independent curator Angela Serino.

The first two weekends of ‘On Residency’ will be marked by the design of a conceptual and material framework. Serino invited the Italian artist Paula Anziché to build her installation ‘Spaziando’, together with guests and visitors of Kunsthuis SYB. ‘Spaziando’ is a large and complex net of Lycra in which, during the programme, participants can move and nest themselves, as if it were a collective body. Through this collective, physical interaction with the work, ‘Spaziando’ creates an environment in which new thoughts and ideas can be developed and exchanged.

A second recurring theme in the programme ‘On Residency’ is the reading group, which assembles at different moments in Kunsthuis SYB. From a collection of texts, this reading group investigates the roles a residency can play in artistic production. The residency is mainly approached as a break from daily routine, as a prerequisite for an investigation into conditions of work and the possibilities to find a better balance between living and working. The reading group consists of the artists’ collectives ADA (Rotterdam) and The Living Room(s) (Amsterdam), and additionally the visual artist Elsbeth Ciesluk and the art historian Suzie Hermán.

The progress of the investigation can be followed on the ‘weblog’. There, you will find the texts that the reading group discusses. For those who are interested, it is possible to participate in the programme in Kunsthuis SYB by contacting A. Serino or Kunsthuis SYB by email or phone.

Angela Serino (1977, IT) is an independent curator. She graduated (cum laude) in Mass Communication at the University of Siena and moved to Amsterdam to attend the De Appel Curatorial programme in 2006. Since then she has curated several solo and group shows in institutions and art organisations, such as De Brakke Grond Amsterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, TENT. Rotterdam, and the European Cultural Foundation Amsterdam. In 2009 she curated RED A.i.R./Redlight Art Amsterdam, a project initiated by the City of Amsterdam, De Key/Principaal, SMBA and Kunstenaars&CO. Since 2010, Angela Serino has been part of the programming committee of Kunsthuis SYB.

Practical Information:
28 March – 8 May 2012
Opening hours work period: every Saturday and Sunday from 13:00 – 17:00.
Kunsthuis SYB, Hoofdstraat 70, 9244 CP, Beetsterzwaag