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A Common Dialect
Curator: Femke Dekker
With contributions by The Session, Our Polite Society, Maarten Simons and several alumni of the ABKM
This summer project is financially supported by the Maastricht Youngsters program of the Municipality of Maastricht
A Common Dialect is a twofold inquiry into the concept of ‘school’ as a historical model for the self-organizing ability of artists, in the form of an exhibition and a so-called summer school.
Artists work in groups. Collective work is an a priori, a reality of creative life. At nearly every moment in art history artists have been working together in one way or another and under many different arrangements, sharinga common dialect. The exhibition reflects on the context in which the commonality of visual style linking the works and artists included in a school has come into prominence. The expression and explanation of movements has come from the artists themselves, sometimes in the form of an art manifesto, and sometimes from art critics or historians who have defined the common influence of a group of artists as a school.
Taking both the Tilburg School and the New Leipziger Schule as the point of departure, the first and second part of the A Common Dialect exhibition present contemplative articles, visual references and selected works by artists of both schools in an encyclopedic-like grid. The third installment in the exhibition has been allocated to the young collective The Session; eight international designers and artists that have been publishing thematic, interdisciplinary and collective presentations since September ‘07. The particular interest in A Common Dialect is the locality of the school: the manner in which schools have traditionally been bound to specific geographical places, resulting in the developments of communal modes of thinking andworking. In that sense, a school can be seen as a process in which the tactility of a physical surrounding is translated into the tactility of a specific handwriting. The question is now: has the rise of Internet, and the globalization of culture, eroded this concept, or is the idea of a school still grounded in the locality of a physical environment?
With contributions by a.o.: The Session, Jan Dörre, Guido Geelen, Marc Mulders, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Johannes Rochhausen, Miriam Vlaming, Reinoud van Vught, Our Polite Society, Maarten Simons, several alumni of the ABKM.
