Exhibition opening | Kringplank
Three young female artists show new work created especially for De Kring.
On Thursday 4 April, the exhibition ‘Kringplank’ opened at cultural club De Kring. For this exhibition, three young female artists developed new work especially for De Kring. With Kringplank, De Kring wants to offer young makers a stage to develop and reach a larger audience. The initiative was made possible thanks to a donation from the Van Den Ende Foundation.
Intergenerational collaboration
For this first edition of Kringplank, three promising artists were selected by De Kring’s Arts Committee. The selected makers were paired with established artists who are members of De Kring:
- Ayşen Kaptanoglu was paired with Jacqueline de Jong
- Emily Stevenhagen was paired with Moritz Ebinger
- Tara Eva Kuijpers Wentink was paired with Jeroen Henneman
With this mentorship, De Kring aims to realise intergenerational collaborations within which frameworks are broadened and new connections are made.
About the artists & their work
Ayşen Kaptanoğlu, born in Istanbul in 1985, explores power dynamics, sexuality, gender and violence through painting and animation. She graduated from the Wackers Academy in Amsterdam in 2021 and is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.
Her work for Kringplank was inspired by the long, fixed bench in the exhibition space of De Kring, a place that was once established by only men. She wanted to create an image of a woman and a man sitting together on a bench, close together yet far apart. The unequal power dynamic creates resistance and tension, with the woman constrained by a phallic snake coiling around her body, preventing her from leaving, speaking or even moving, although she would like to. Mysterious shadows are projected behind her back, making her position on the couch uncertain. On the other side of the sofa, the man too seems to be unhappy, as the absence of one ultimately affects both.
Emily Stevenhagen, living and working in The Hague, explores everyday intimacies and connections through painting, performance and more. Her work explores our relationship with others, the environment and ourselves, playing with memories and the past. She uses her personal archive and abstract representations to convey inner emotions to the audience. Her painting studies capture a timeless atmosphere where past, present and future merge.
For Kringplank, she presents the work “When all the animals are leaving and we are staying”. It includes oil paintings, scattered text, painted objects and a short documented performance on the opening day on 4 April.
Tara-Eva Kuijpers Wentink explores abstract, organic forms inspired by both human anatomy and the natural world. She combines ceramics and textiles to create a tangible dimension that invites the audience to participate in her sculptural installations, which form an imaginary space in which another world is suggested.
For Kringplank, she created a proliferating wall installation made of flesh-coloured fabric. This makes the work look like a kind of suffocating vine of organs. The work is flanked by a kind of supernatural organisms and a Magic Spring from which to drink. She wants the audience to look at another reality with a curious eye, showing both the beauty of origins and the alienation of new life and transience.
Theme of the exhibition
The overarching theme of the exhibition is ’the knife cuts both ways’. It expresses the idea that as a closed member society, De Kring has both beautiful and dark sides. A members’ society such as De Kring is almost by definition inward-looking and has traditionally been primarily a men’s stronghold where innovation comes by fits and starts. On the other hand, it is a place of entertainment, good food and heated debate on all sorts of subjects, including regeneration and modernization.
From the balcony at the Leidseplein, we see parallel developments happening outside. Women are more often invited and placed on pedestals in museums, to focus on this aspect. At the same time, the femicide figures in the newspapers do not lie, and the headlines about women’s boardroom quota still ominously state that having more female board members ‘does not lead to less competent board members’. Why not cut to the chase and acknowledge that women are good directors? And good artists, for that matter. Needless to say, Emily Stevenhagen, Tara Eva Kuijpers Wentink and Ayşen Kaptanoglu took to heart our invitation to adopt and critically examine De Kring both as venue and as a society.
Ayşen especially felt the past of De Kring as a place where women had less space than men who formed the majority and – with a few exceptions – dominated the board. And while women did visit De Kring back then, to what extent can we really imagine what it was like for them? For Ayşen, the sofa is a central object. Now everybody is equally welcome to sit on it, yet she positions the piece of furniture as a place where men and women are not on equal footing.
Emily uses different media (various canvases, texts, painted objects and a performance) to focus on how we can represent the past, thoughts and ideas. Through blurred images she makes discomfort and emotions of present, past and future visible. When all the animals are leaving and we are staying (2024) is a painted expression of this.
Tara’s work is seemingly soft and cuddly. With ceramics and textiles, eminently touchable materials, she invites exploration and immersion into another world. With organic forms and colors, her installation sculpts a world that is, however, less pleasant than it first appears. Fortunately there is still the Magic Spring with mysterious powers from which to drink. She thus asks the audience to be curious about another reality, one that shows both the beauty and alienation of new life and of transience.
De Kring also invites members and visitors to immerse themselves in a world of transience versus new life, in which both the decline and strength of the present age can be recognized. Thus the knife cuts both ways.
The artists were mentored during their assignment by established Kring-artists Moritz Ebinger, Jeroen Henneman and Jacqueline de Jong. The latter, 84, is a renowned artist and was the only woman to form part of the Situationist movement back in the ’60s. Later, she edited an art magazine in Paris. She is rightfully a role model and we can vividly imagine that she and the other women had to fight tooth and nail to win their place, paving the way for where we are today.
Visit the exhibition
The vernissage took place on 4 April 2024, 18:00.
Are you not (yet) a member of De Kring but would you like to visit the exhibition at another time? You can do so from Monday to Friday by registering via this link.
There are also Open Days with guided tours on 12 April, 26 April and 17 May. There are limited places available for these, so register in time.