Duende is the largest studio-complex in Rotterdam, hosting more than fifty artists in forty-two studios. Besides forty-six permanent members, Duende runs a residency program and hosts a variable number of guests who share studios with the permanent members.

Duende members are:

• Esther Akkerhuis
• Dagmar Baumann
• Bik van der Pol
• Jacqueline le Bleu
• Antoinette Bloemen
• Hanneke Breuker
• Peter Carels
• Laura d’Ors
• Cor Drost
• Rolf Engelen
• Risk Hazekamp
• Kuin Heuff
• Ari Hodgson
• Daan den Houter
• Maarten Janssen
• Aline Keller
• Arthur Kleinjan
• Peter Koole
• Marjan Laaper
• Ine Lamers
• David Maroto
• Mies van Marrewijk
• Marc Müller
• Ralph van Meijgaard
• Jan Neggers
• Rolina Nell
• Dorus Nijholt
• Désirée Palmen
• Hieke Pars
• Jan van de Pavert
• Axel Reusch
• Gert Rietveld
• Leslie Robbins
• Jan Willem v.d. Schoot
• Jack Segbars
• Niels Smits van Burgst
• Lieke Snellen
• David Stamp
• Maurice Thomassen
• Edward Clydesdale Thomson
• Karin Trenkel
• Stephan Valk
• Reinaart Vanhoe
• Lidwien van de Ven
• Dré Wapenaar
• Marleen van Wijngaarden

Read more about Duende

Duende welcomes its new resident artists:

• Frédéric Sanchez (FR)
• Emily Whitebread (GB)

For more information visit our residency section

From April st1, Duende welcomes its newest member Daan den Houter. For more information about his work www.daandenhouter.com.

At the same time, we say goodbye to Huub Laurens and to longtime Duende member Jeanne van Heeswijk.

• Grégory Cuquel
• Luisa Kasalicky
• Bjørn Melhus
• Ornaghi & Prestinari

Sils Project Space is proud to announce its forthcoming exhibition, The Self-Moving Number. This exhibition brings together four artists whose work deals with notions of time, space and materiality. Aesthetics from different time periods, as well as questioning the stuff the moon’s made of and gifs steeped in gestalt are presented here as a survey that looks at the object. How do we associate with it? What is its role in the wider cultural field? How does an object’s composition dictate how we view it?

Exhibition
April 1-15, 2012
Duende Studios, Tamboerstraat 9, 3034 PT Rotterdam
Opening Saturday March 31, 2012 at 7pm
Opening times Friday-Sunday 1-5pm or by appointment

Artist Talk
Friday March 30, 2012 at 7pm
Magic Bar, Pompstraat 44C, Charlois, Rotterdam
Magic Bar will host a talk in which Grégory Cuquel and Ornaghi & Prestinari will give an introduction to their work. Food will be served afterwards.

Call for proposals
Project space in Duende Studios
4 month period: May until August 2012
A 60 m² Ground floor studio with a 4.5 m high ceiling and internet connection: 250 euro per month (incl. btw)

We also offer, for an additional low price, the possibility of combining the project space with renting a bedroom in the building.

If you are interested please send us a c.v, documentation of your work and a proposal on how you would like to use the space for this specific period in pdf format to the email address below.

Deadline: 01 April 2012

For more detailed information and prices please contact:
activities@duendestudios.nl

6-9 pm Het Wilde Weten
Hellebou vol. 4: Here and there

9pm-onwards Duende
Tossing around with a chair in the corridor
Presentations by Simon Kentgens and Duende-residents Tetsushi Higashino and Jean-Charles de Quillacq.

Tetsushi Higashino and Jean-Charles de Quillacq will present the exhibition ‘Tossing around a chair in the corridor’ at Duende. During their residency period they became familiar with the work of the Rotterdam based artist Simon Kentgens, with which they found interesting connections. Higashino is fascinated by Kentgens’ artistic approach towards our daily life surroundings. Quillacq will react on Kentgens’ work with a performance during the exhibition’s opening.

Tetsushi Higashino (JP)
Tetsushi Higashino regards himself as an ‘unproductive production activist’, apparently his definition of an artist. His works make visible the logic of this notion and these metaphorical visions often derive from things that subliminally intervene in our daily lives. They transform the ordinary world we overlook into one of the most extraordinary nonsense.

Jean-Charles de Quillacq (FR)
Jean-Charles de Quillacq plays combinatory games by forcing different shapes and materials to make contact, often in an unnatural promiscuity without anything ever merging. This idea of closeness is coupled with resemblance, as in family resemblances, because de Quillacq often roughly reproduces or imitates his previous works for generating new ones, mimicking the lineage of a fake genetic family. Sexual reproduction is not the only organic process that de Quillacq’s works recall, since many of his shapes refer to the digestion and its converted substances. Moreover, his sculptures are hardly fixed and seem to result from simple and daily gestures.

Simon Kentgens (NL)
Simon Kentgens lifts everyday objects out of their normal environment. He creates new references in which they can be viewed. These objects and situations suddenly acquire multiple meanings. They seem to become strange in their new surroundings, as if they have to get used to their recently acquired status as a work of art. To create these unbalancing confrontations Kentgens applies different strategies.

Recently, during Re:Rotterdam, he transformed a former office space using the available materials, such as the door to the room and left over window blinds. A door, slowly revolving, continuously bumped into another open door. This site-specific installation was the reason for Quillacq and Higashino to invite Kentgens for their show at Duende. In this show Kentgens searches for common ground between both their practices.

RAIR #5 is an initiative by RAiR (Rotterdam Artist in Residence)

A group exhibition where six Fine Arts students graduating from the Willem De Kooning Academy take their own perspective on the role of the institution in art.

• Jim Impelmans
• Rosa Peters
• Remty Elenga
• Claire van Lubeek
• The Force of Freedom

The exhibition will run March 15-19, 2012
Open 1pm-6pm

AIR Stammtisch is a monthly occasion for Rotterdam residents to meet each other. It gives the possibility to meet the other artists in residence in an informal setting and talk about your work or chat about your experiences during your stay.

AIR Stammtisch take place at 8pm at Locus Publikus, Oostzeedijk 364

January 18, 2012
February 15, 2012
March 21, 2012
April 18, 2012
May 16, 2012
June 20, 2012

The coordinator of RAiR, the network of Rotterdam Artists in Residence, will be there as well, in case you would like to propose a contribution or when you have questions concerning network or production.

AiR Stammtisch is an initiative by Duende.

Duende would like to invite you to the New Year’s Reception
Presentations, StalkTalks & Music
Sunday 15th of January, 2012 4–7pm
Be welcome and let’s toast to the future!

See Stephan Valk’s website for more information about his work.

We also say goodbye to Boris van Berkum.

Eleni Kamma & Elliot Collins
Opening 16 December 7pm
Exhibition 17-18 December 2011 1-5pm

Artists Eleni Kamma and Elliot Collins present within the ­context of their artist-in-residency period at Duende the ­exhibition ‘a lone a last a loved a long the’.

Eleni Kamma’s work ranges a broad spectrum of media: scripts, videos, books, installations and drawings in which she ­addresses inherent gaps and contradictions within existing ­cultural narratives and structures. These gaps are often objects or stories that, through the omission of their actual history, transform into stereotypes. By revisiting systems of classification and strategies of ­description and taxonomy, she examines the relation of the cliché, the banal and the stereotype, to the formation of ­history and the production of meaning. In her recent body of work she examines how words and images can co-exist and ­create meaning by disrupting it; make sense by seemingly letting meaning collapse.

Eleni Kamma has been working on the Rotterdam-part of a ­trilogy project. In Duende she will show the part situated in ­Jämtland, Sweden titled P like Politics, P like Parrots­ in which the amateur choir of the parish of Bräcke was asked to participate in a collaborative reading experiment of a two-page text. The text, P like Politics, shifts between the ­famous hand game, Paper-Rock-Scissors, and P-words chosen ­randomly from a 2003 speech by George Bush.

Eleni Kamma (CY/GR) 1973, lives and works in Brussels and Maastricht. Her work is presented internationally at: Wiels Project Room, Brussels 2010, Villa Romana, Florence 2012, ­IASPIS, Stockholm 2011, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg 2011, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht 2008.

Elliot Collins’ work starts from painterly concerns, but his practice is not directed at solely solving artistic issues. The paintings mostly consist of text and paint applied in a seemingly expressionist fashion. The nature of text often­ seems searching and poetic; probing the tentative space ­between viewer, maker and medium. Often these texts hint at reflections of a personal nature though maintaining a quality of generality.

Although at first glance expressionistic, his painting expresses­ a control and restraint. They point to the ambiguousness of them being construed. This apparent contradiction keeps the on-looker searching for the intention of the maker and the artwork, stressing the fact that we are looking for clues and answers, art’s core-business. Art here becomes the backdrop for communication in general. Collins’ concern lies in the space in between, the third space: the space between himself as the producer and the painting, the space between text and the painterly expression,­ the space between the on-looker and the artwork, the space between personal and the general.

Elliot Collins (NZ) 1983. Since graduating with an MA from Auckland University of Technology in 2007 he has been showing­ nationally and internationally. He has work in public­ and private art collections. He is represented by Tim ­Melville Gallery in Auckland and Bartley and Company Art in Wellington.­ He lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.

Made possible with the generous support of dKC Rotterdam, dienst Kunst en Cultuur and Fonds BKVB.

Duende resident artists Elliot Collins (NZ) and Eleni Kamma (CY/GR) will take part at the RAiR Artist Talk at Het Wilde Weten on November 9.

Doors open 7.30pm
Artist talk 8-10pm

4 times a year Rotterdam Artists in Residence organizes an Artist Talk at Het Wilde Weten. This evening 10 current Artists in Residence show their work and tell about the plans for their stay in Rotterdam. The presentations are 10 minutes each.

Participating artists: Annabela Cuomo (IT), Arie Bouman (NL), Bebe Beliz (TR), Eleni Kamma (CY/GR), Jay Tan (UK), LucFosther Diop (CM), Nicky Larkin KAUS (IE), Sarojini Lewis (NL) Eleni Kamma (CY/GR), Eileen Maxson (USA) and Elliot Collins (NZ).

Het Wilde Weten
Robert Fruinstraat 35
3021 XB Rotterdam
How to get there

Read more about RAiR and about the RAiR Artist Talk at RAiR’s website
RAiR (Rotterdam Artists in Residence) is founded by artists’ initiatives Duende, Het Wilde Weten, Kaus Australis, Foundation B.a.d. and Kunst & Complex. Every year more then 50 artists stay for a longer or shorter period in Rotterdam. They join the local art scene and with their presence enriche cultural life in the city. RAiR is an international platform and network that aims to optimize the residency policy by making visible links between the artists in residence, the artists initiatives and the Rotterdam art and culture scene.

Duende welcomes its new resident artists:

• Elliot Collins (NZ)
• Eleni Kamma (CY/GR)

For more information visit our residency section

Kuin Heuff paints portraits on paper which she then cuts into a graphic lace-like structure, wich is a way of research towards the production of images by destructing them.

Women of all cultures take centre stage in Rolina Nell’s paintings, sometimes represented by motifs that traditionally belong to women, such as laundry and playgrounds. Often seen from the back, enigmatic, en profile or zoomed in. During her travels she takes photographs and makes sketches, back in the studio she incorporates this in her paintings.