Duende

Featuring Jason Coburn, Daniël Dee, Bernd Krauß & Jay Tan
Moderated by Edward Clydesdale Thomson

BRAK TALK is the discursive arm of the new Rotterdam exhibition platform BRAK. The first BRAK TALK, on the 14th of November at 14:30 in Duende, brings together four divers voices in a dialogue around some of the themes, questions and positions raised by our current exhibition of Ton Schuttelaars’ and Evi Vingerlings’ work.

This first exhibition, New Minimalism, focuses on possibilities and proposals for the continuation of Minimalism, one of the most important mainstreams within the tradition of modern art. How can we construe a definition of art beyond and referring to Minimalism? The first BRAK TALK event will broadly address the consequences and possibilities opened up by a reductive strategy as primary operating method by traversing parallel practices within a wider field.

Jason Coburn will give a talk which takes E.H. Gombrich’s notion of the Etc Principle as a way of navigating pattern and decoration through a selection of images and non-sequiturs. The Etc Principle describes the point at which the detail of a mass become lost in an overall texture – the moment where we go from reading to ‘reading in’; “The blob may be a man or it may be a brush, but while we wonder, we tentatively transform it.”

Jay Tan will be presenting her thoughts on her notion of “pottering about”, and how this term can be re-claimed to provide an attitude to making within an art practice. Closely connected to pleasure and hobby, pottering describes time spent immersed in an activity full of care and play. During the BRAK TALK Jay will give examples of people who “potter” and occasions when this attitude of “serious play” can be found in other areas of production.

The poet Daniël Dee will read a number of his recent works. The frequent subject of his work is his own life within the daily tapestry that he scrutinizes in staccato poetry. He analyzes the naked existence that he comments upon without scruples, without sparing his own sensitivities. His work is raw and confronting.

And the idiosyncratic broadcasts of the RTLlocal channel will interject between speakers with transmissions from the everyday. Short video fragments from a seemingly unmanned TV channel, the clips appear as leftovers of unknown yet humanist authorship. Moments, situations and events minimally captured and displayed. Themes reoccur but their logic and structure escape categorization.

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