THE STORY WITHIN AND BEYOND
ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE
PART IVa: Emilie Ruitinga & Nienke Sikkema
MAY 4TH - MAY 20TH
OPENING: FRIDAY, MAY 4th, 19:00 H
OPEN: FRI - SUN | 13:00 - 17:00 H
All the World's a Stage part IVa exhibition (Nienke Sikkema, Emilie Ruitinga) and part IVb the performance program (Natalie Fyfe, Katerina Sidorova) focus on "the stage" as a possible place for creating and recreating stories, lives and identities, reversing an inner world stage into an outer (public) world stage and vice versa. It also examines the fragility of the human body and the exposure of one's intimacy to the outside world.
Nienke Sikkema brings three different stages into the exhibition space, actually three „stage like sculptures“ which invite the viewer to think about the possibilities and impossibilities of the presentation of oneself in public.
One stage is made of metal, one of glass and one of fabric (plush/velvet), so they also affect the performer in different ways. One of the stages, the yellow one made of fabric, also gives the possibility to the performer to hide in the forest of its big, yellow sticks, therefore it allows the performer to hide their face and perform more freely, to expose their intimate world. On Sikkema's stages the performer almost becomes one with the stage, he/she merges with it, making the stage an active, equal participant in the presentation.
Emilie Ruitinga in her video installation creates the intimate red room which becomes a kind of peep show for the animation My Girl. My Girl is a surreal animation piece quite focused on a body and the division and deconstruction of the body and its face parts. For thist reason the red room, where the viewer is situated and where we peep through the hole into the My Girl animation, evokes the color of the inside of our bodies. In this work we become a kind of voyeurs into somebody else's world of the subconscious, and since we peep and our faces remain hidden, we can do with them whatever we want while confronting the surreal shapes and the intimidating sounds coming from the animation.
"The poetry performance for the opening of "All the World's a Stage" by singer-poet Nicole Jordan , writer and poet Neva Lukic, visual artist and poet Brigitte Spiegeler.
text: Neva Lukic
photos: Anke van den Berg
