Exhibition

 Marc Niessen

Marc Niessen is Co-Director and Co-Curator of De Overslag, an artist-run centre that he co-founded in 1996. Apart from his work organizing countless exhibitions and residencies at De Overslag, Niessen has initiate and organized projects as an independent curator such as Work in progress in 1992 which featured the presentation of a number of works in public areas in Eindhoven and GROUND in 2007 which linked a variety of projects by local and international artists with a number of art institutions and alternatives spaces such as Van Abbemuseum and MU. Niessen has also maintained an artistic practice of his own and he has participated in solo and group exhibitions in The Netherlands, Hungary, UK, Germany and Tunisia.

Katie Bethune Leamen

Katie Bethune Leamen (TORONTO, CANADA) learned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montreal, QC) and completed a MFA at the University of Guelph in 2003. Since then she has had solo exhibitions such as Wouldn’t It Be (Ice, Ice) at the Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax) in 2005, and Bite at Paul Petro Gallery (Toronto) in 2005, and she has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, the USA, and abroad. Her most recent solo exhibition was The Valhalla Suite: A Critical Misunderstanding at the Centre for Culture & Leisure No. 1 (Toronto) in 2007 in which she examined aspects of art production through the lens of the suburban commoditization of Viking beliefs in an afterlife. Bethune-Leamen would like to thank the Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council, FASTWRMS and Jon Hunter.

Luis Jacob

Luis Jacob (TORONTO, CANADA) is a Toronto-based artist whose artistic practice is characterized by an extension to other fields of social and cultural work. He makes use of formats such as installation, photography, performance and actions in the public domain just as much as his work as author, teacher, curator and political activist. The experimentation with alternative forms for the creation of social interaction and participation plays a central role. Luis Jacob has participated in important international exhibitions including documenta12 (Kassel, Germany) and Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican Art Gallery (London, UK), and is producing a solo exhibition for Stdtisches Museum Abteiberg Mnchengladbach scheduled in the fall of 2008. Luis Jacob’s project for YYZ/De Overslag is based on his installation Habitat, which was first exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2005. He is also involved in the community-education collective, the Anarchist Free University in Toronto. Image credit: Inhabitants , 2008, courtesy of Birch Libralato (Toronto).

Corwyn Lund

Corwyn Lund’s (TORONTO, CANADA) formative public art installations examine architectural thresholds as social boundaries. In Swingsite (produced for YYZ’s Psychotopes show in 2003), walls which cannot be breached are deftly navigated between. In MusicBox RevolvingDoor (Kitchener City Hall) and Parlour of Twilight (Gladstone Hotel room 405), doors and windows are re-animated with sonic and atmospheric effects which blur the boundaries between public and private space. Recent gallery-based installations such as the Microphone Bouquet Series (Mercer Union, 2007), memorialize news media as a public site of collective loss. Lund’s work has been shown internationally and is held in the Library & Archives of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Rob Moonen

Rob Moonen (TILBURG, THE NETHERLANDS) completed his training as an art instructor at NLO Mollerinstituut (Tilburg) in 1982. He studied sculpture at the Academie voor Beeldende Vorming (Tilburg) from 1982 to 1984. Moonen lived and worked in Berlin from 1989 until 1991 and in 1993 was awarded with the Karl Hofer prize in Germany for perhaps his best known work, Camera Silens. Recent projects include Noord, an interdisciplinary theatre project with live video, dance and music at Theatre de NWE Vorst Tilburg presented in 2008, From the nuclear shelter at the Museum van Bommel van Dam (Venlo, The Netherlands) in 2007 and S.O.P./ Seizure of Power at Museum de Pont (Tilburg) in 2005. Moonen’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as Excess at Z33 Hasselt in Belgium in 2006, Regarding Terror: The RAF-Exhibition at Kunstwerke Berlin in 2005, the 7th Havana biennale in 2001 and Deep Storage presented at the Nationalgalerie SMPK (Berlin) and at PS1 (New York) in 1997. In 2007, Moonen executed the public commissions Mager & Vet, a permanent text based installation for the City of Amsterdam and Natura Artis Magistra, a permanent 4-channel video installation at the University of Tilburg. Moonen has also participated in a number of residencies in such cities as Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Munich, Capetown, Calgary, Perth, Piotrkow and Tokyo. In his daily practice Moonen collaborates with various artists, architects, writers, theatre directors, muscians and locals to realize projects.

Wouter Osterholt/ Elke Uitentuis

Wouter Osterholt/ Elke Uitentuis (WARNS, THE NETHERLANDS) Elke Uitentuis graduated at the AKI art academy, department mixed media in 2001. In 2003 she won the Mama Cash art prize 2003 awarded to a young female artist. She did performances and made music. After graduating at the Rietveld academy in 2001 Wouter Osterholt worked together with Marjolijn Dijkman for three years. Together they ran a project space in Rotterdam, which over its history organized thirty-five exhibitions. Together, Osterholt and Dijkman had several exhibitions such as Marres (Maastricht), TENT (Rotterdam), Optrek (Den Haag) and Artis (De Bosch). Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis began working together in 2005. Their first collaborative project was an architectural installation in De Overslag, (Eindhoven). In 2006 they organised an artist in residence in Groningen where they invited six international artists to investigate the impact of art in public space. In 2007 they started with context-related video-projections of construction workers in public space through a commission by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunsten. In summer 2007 they participated at the performance festival in Nijmegen (The Netherlands), a Triangle workshop in Shatana (Jordan) and a group project in Targu Mures (Romania). In all of these contexts they realized different interventions in public space. In the fall of 2007 they founded Public Interface , a research bureau for critical reflection on social engaged art practices and organized a think-tank and residence in Buro Leeuwarden, Frysian Museum (The Netherlands). In December 2007 Osterholt and Uitentuis were artists in residence in Reykjavik, Iceland and from February through June 2008 they are in residence at the Townhouse, Cairo, Egypt.

Sandy Plotnikoff

Sandy Plotnikoff (TORONTO, CANADA) earned a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1997. He has participated in exhibitions and related projects such as Video Users Video program (Shinobu Akimoto, Curator) at Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya (Tokyo) and at Remo (Osaka) in 2006, the group exhibition The End at H Block Gallery (Brisbane) in 2006, the 2005 Basel Art Fair in Miami with Art Metropole, the 2004 Oberhausen Film Festival and 17 Reasons at the Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco among numerous others. Plotnikoff is best known for his wearable objects, constructions and interventions, including his virus-like snaps project: Sandy Plotnikoff would like to thank Miles Collyer, Paul Lamothe, and Swintak.

Nicoline Van Harskamp

Nicoline Van Harskamp (AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS) completed her sculpture MA at Chelsea College in 1997 and has produced art projects within and outside the United Kingdom since. She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2006 and 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest at Casco (Utrecht) and Nikolaj CCAC (Copenhagen), Supervision at the California Museum of Photography (Riverside) and Watchers at Coleman Project Space (London). Recent group exhibitions include Tongue Liberated at INSA Art Space for the Arts Council of Korea (Seoul), Ruby Satellite at Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Call me Istanbul at ZKM (Karlsruhe) and On Patrol at De Appel (Amsterdam). For her series of works on surveillance personnel she was shortlisted for the 2004 Beck’s Futures prize. van Harskamp has been a resident artist at, amongst others, Platform Garanti (Istanbul), Project Studio Bro Friedrich (Berlin), the Christiania Researcher in Residence Program (Copenhagen). Since 1999, she regularly participates in a project team for the London-based art and architecture collective Public Works, most recently in Linz. Nicoline van Harskamp has widely screened and discussed her work, making a point of doing so both inside and outside the context of art. Recent presentations took place at the Architects Association (London), the Libertarian Party of the Netherlands (Den Haag), Arsenale Art (Poznan), Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Birkbeck School of Law (London) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Robin Van T Haar

Robin Van T Haar (AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS) studied visual arts at the Minerva Academie (BA) in Groningen and at the Piet Zwart Institute (MA) in Rotterdam. For the past six years he has been working on the project City Scripts, a long-term public art project for which van t Haar employs the use of a wide variety of media including performance, video, webblogs and printed matter. Through City Scripts he observes and records everyday behavior of users of (semi) public spaces to offer people new perspectives on places they use day-by-day. City Scripts includes projects and commissions at such venues as Schiphol Amsterdam Airport, the Rotterdam Metro Line, the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs, Amsterdam Centre District and at the Spaarne Hospital in Hoofddorp.