9 October - 1 December 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to host the first solo exhibition by Thania Petersen in Amsterdam, organized by Afro Vibes.

Thania Petersen is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses photography, performance and installation to address the intricacies and complexities of her identity in contemporary South Africa.
Petersen’s reference points sit largely in Islam and in creating awareness about its religious, cultural and traditional practices. She attempts to unpack contemporary trends of Islamophobia through her analysis of the continuing impact of colonialism, European and American imperialism, and the increasing influence of right-wing ideologies.
Threads in her work include the history of colonial imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the social and cultural impact of westernised consumer culture. Her work is also informed by her Cape Malay heritage, and the practice of Sufi Islamic religious ceremonies.

Thania Petersen has received the Thami Mnyele Foundation Award and will stay in Amsterdam as artist-in-residence at the studio of the Thami Mnyele Foundation.

05 - 29 September 2019

Since 2011 No Man’s Art Gallery has opened temporary galleries in Rotterdam, Hamburg, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, Cape Town, Shanghai and Tehran showing the work of many young artists in atomic shelters, warehouses, historical residences and graveyards.

Exactly one year ago, the gallery opened a permanent gallery space and bar in Bos & Lommer hosting an exhibition program influenced by the artists and networks we started collaborating with abroad.

The only way to celebrate our 1 year anniversary here in Amsterdam West is by inviting the artists that have been contributing to our international pop-up program over the past 7 years. 

Photos: Dieuwke Eggink

online catalogue

8 June - 18 August 2019

“Reality enters our senses as a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions”, linguist Whorf (1897-1941) once said. This flux must be sorted out in our brains and the structure of our language plays an important role in this. It is estimated that over 7000 different languages are spoken worldwide. All of these languages differ from one another and ask of different information from their speakers. The hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity questions to what extent the language we speak shapes the way we think and, consequently, view the world. If the language you speak has no word for a certain object or concept, does that mean that you’re not capable of thinking about it?

As a photographer with a BA in General Linguistics this question grasped the imagination of Desiré van den Berg, since this could imply that one not only listens but also looks in the language one was taught from birth – purely by chance. It brought her through the heart of Russia, a travel by train through frozen tundra, barren plains and bustling cities, spanning six time zones and ten thousand kilometres. All in search of goluboy – a colour that does not exist in her native tongue.In Russian, goluboy means light blue. Dark(er) blue is siniy. Unlike Dutch (or English), where light and dark blue are two shades of a single colour, in Russian they are separate, each carrying their own associations and implications. As a result, it has been found that this for example affects memory in the way that a non-native Russian speaker is less able to accurately remember the shade of perceived blue. GOLUBOY challenges us to cut our concept of blue in half and maybe even learn to ‘look’ in a different language.

“I followed the path of the Russian language from St. Petersburg, via Moscow to Vladivostok, and captured blue as I know it, all the while exploring the edges and boundaries of my perception. Changing skies and waters along my way showed me blue in all its hues and even the snow adopted a blue glow during twilight hours. It made me wonder: if programming already happens at the unconscious level of language processing, what are the consequences on conscious thinking? What is the role of our language systems in a world of growing polarisation? By using color categorisation in language as an example of the possible underlying process of intuitive thinking, I’m hoping to bring awareness to the subject of subliminal mental boundaries.” - Desiré van den Berg

online catalogue

8 June - 18 August 2019

Mia Chaplin is a painter who lives and works in Cape Town and the second artist-in-residence at the gallery’s permanent space in Bos en Lommer, where she has been working on her new presentation for the past month.
Working in oil on canvas and paper, her highly expressive works are characterized by their rich impasto surfaces and visible brushstrokes. Chaplin’s most recent works emphasize a muted colour palette of pink fleshy tones and golden highlights, consisting of still life, figure studies and landscapes.

For ‘Underbelly’ Chaplin created paintings and sculptural objects, in which she explores the crooked, misshapen and imperfect nature of intimate relationships as they manifest in private environments. Chaplin is interested in gendered power structures and how identity is performed through societally-entrenched femininity. The fracturing of these intimate images suggests a feeling of disrepair or destruction. There is an attempt to garner control and autonomy, a holding together of something which keeps falling apart. ‘Underbelly’ is the urge to create a solid feeling, and the need to understand and own agency.

Since completing her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2011, Chaplin has hosted several solo exhibitions Mouth (2018) and Under a Boiling River (2017), both with WHATIFTHEWORLD. She has also recently extended her painting practice into printmaking, hosting a mini-exhibition of monotypes from the series, The Making of a Sharp Blade (2017), in collaboration with Warren Editions, Cape Town. Chaplin has completed artist residency programs at Cité Internationale Des Artes in the Marais district, Paris (2018), Nirox Arts Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016) and at OBRAS Foundation in Alentejo, Portugal (2015)

Photos: Dieuwke Eggink

9 March - 5 May 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present ‘The beauty one cometh’ the first solo exhibition by Marilyn Sonneveld. The artist presents a new series of work in which she studied the representation of the female body by focussing on beauty, femininity and its manipulation and distortion.

The beauty one cometh is the definition of the name of Nefertiti, the Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. The famous limestone bust of Nefertiti has made her one of the most known woman of the ancient world; the icon of feminine beauty. Throughout the years, the bust of Nefertiti has been represented as such to disguise her missing eye by working with en-profile documentation and shadowing. Marilyn Sonneveld took these obscured deviations of female beauty as a point of departure for her solo exhibition.

The artist presents a series based on eight renowned paintings such as The Venus of Urbino by Titiaan, Venus and Mars by the School of Fontainebleau and Young Woman at her Toilette by Bellini next to works which show female figures found on social media that are distorted, camouflaged and manipulated either by the source or the artist. The series are placed in a site-specific context filled with images which by repetition and zooming in become more and more abstract and unfamiliar.

In the exhibition the eye is the spectator, scattered around the gallery. We are embedded by beauty ideals and hyperreal images. The own eye is by definition a filter –  an algorithm is not only imposed on us, but grows within ourselves.

Marilyn Sonneveld (1990, NL) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam in 2013. Her practice centers around sexuality, femininity and flowers in illustration and printing techniques. Sonneveld is the co-founder of Wipsite a novel and contemporary form of sexual education in form of animation and illustration.

Photo credits: Neeltje de Vries

9 March - 5 May 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present RECOLLECTION, the first solo exhibition by Majid Biglari in Amsterdam. The in Tehran-based artist is the first artist-in-residence at the gallery’s new location in Bos & Lommer and has been working on a new series on site for the past two months.

RECOLLECTION shows his new series titled Mourning (2019) consisting of sculptures, a photographic installation, paintings and a video, which is the result of the artist’s archival collection of various global events of terror, loss and natural disasters.

Living among the ruins has become an inseparable part of life. The remains are raw, scattered and inconsistent signs of all things that no longer exist. The subdued experience of living in the new world order will not erase these facts from our daily existence, as images, news, and information are readily available to us throughout different media. We find ourselves among the ruins everywhere. The availability of information does not increase awareness or prevents the ruins, but normalizes them, while people continue living in ignorance. Ruins become reduced experiences of humans.

Majid Biglari presents five memorials, objects in which he addresses the absence of their initial traces. What is left is solely their aesthetic formal quality. Memorials, with the accumulation of their bitter memories, are becoming useless, fake bodies; structures that reproduce aestheticized versions of disasters, while they become part of it. When humanity does not take time to mourn, monuments of oblivion are produced one after the other in old and new formats. Numbers lose their expressiveness and return to their formal, abstract nature.

Majid Biglari (Iran, 1986) earned his BA in Sculpture from Tehran University of Art. He has exhibited his work in various solo and group exhibitions in amongst others at TMoCA as part of the 7th Edition of Tehran National Sculpture Biennial, Mohsen Gallery Tehran, Rogue Space New York and No Man’s Art Pop-up Gallery Tehran in 2016. Majid Biglari lives and works in Tehran.

Photos: Neeltje de Vries

Art Rotterdam
7 - 10 Feb. 2019

Majid Biglari
Afra Eisma
Buhlebezwe Siwani

Press:
Museumtijdschrift 2019

REQUEST PORTFOLIO

2 February - 3 March 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present Meta Darlings, a group exhibition organised by Berlin-based artist Fabian Herkenhoener:

The next day we hit the road in her parents car to find that secret world she saw the day before, appearing in the surface of a rotten apple.

Leaving balance as an act of doing, just letting go, getting lost in order to make –leaving conformity leaving sanity, to unknown territory where shapes of reality can appear. There’s no linear hierarchy or logic — striving to the antipodes of consciousness. The consequence of this self- performing uncertainty leads to the materialization of a true reckless abandon.

Reality is a labyrinth which can be navigated in different ways. There’s not only one solution to solve its riddles. We are facing a time of creating an identity which transcends the boundaries of our own little shells. We should embrace and cultivate the synaptic and spiritual networks we create with others.

Press:
”Jezelf verliezen om iets wezenlijks te maken”, Het Parool, Edo Dijksterhuis
Meta Darlings, Tzvetnik 2018

Photo credits: Neeltje de Vries