FIRST
WE QUAKE NOW WE SHAKE
A TRAVELLING EXHIBITION WITH GLOBETROTTERS IN JEWELLERY
OPENING
NIGHT 11 OCTOBER 2007, 17-20
EXHIBITION RUNS UNTIL 24 NOVEMBER
OPEN MON-FRI 11-18, SAT 11-15
CURATORS:
ELA BAUER
KARIN SEUFERT
For
english version, please schroll down.
Världen är stor men smyckevärlden liten - liten som ett
smycke självt.
Storleken till trots, talar smycken om vilka vi är. De visar attityder,
identiteter och status. Vem är du, vem är jag, vi och dom,
härifrån och därifrån?
Smyckekonstnärerna
är globetrotters, rastlösa nomader som slår sig ner
varstans det finns andra konstnärer. I den globala världen
talar vi ändå om lands-identiteter.
Året för den första "Jewelry Quake",
1993, reste tre utvalda studenter från the Rietveld Academy i
Amsterdam och tre från the Akademie der Bildende Künste i
München till Japan för att möta tre studenter från
Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry i Tokyo.
Inte så länge sedan kan man tycka men studenterna vände
fullständigt upp och ner på varandras idéer kring
smyckekonst.
Nu 14 år senare i en samlad men ändå splittrad värld,
samlas de igen för att helt shakea loss.
-Den här gången är de inte dem själva de vänder upp och ner på utan på oss betraktare.
The project is supported by Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam
Artists:
Ela bauer
(the Rietveld
Academy i Amsterdam)
Karin Seufert
(the Rietveld Academy i Amsterdam)
Manon van Kouswijk
(the Rietveld Academy i Amsterdam)
Volker Atrops
(the Akademie der Bildende Künste i München)
Karl Frisch
(the Akademie
der Bildende Künste i München)
Norman Weber
(the Akademie der Bildende Künste i München)
Teruo Akatsu
(Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry i Tokyo)
The first globetrotters in jewellery
Jewellery
makers are globetrotters, restless nomads who may settle everywhere where
they can find fellow craftsmen and women. The world is big, but the world
of jewellery is small - its size related to the size of the contemporary
author jewel itself. However this goes for the situation anno 2006. In
1993, the year of the first Jewelry Quake, the situation was quite different.
Internet was still in the future, we had never heard of price breakers
in the aviation branch, and who had a mobile phone in these days? Distances
were larger, and information was more limited. In that period three chosen
Rietveld Academy students (Ela Bauer, Manon van Kouswijk and Karin Seufert)
and three students of the Akademie der Bildende Künste in München
(Volker Atrops, Karl Fritsch and Norman Weber) travelled to Japan to cooperate
with three students of Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo ( Teruo
Akatsu, Yoshihiko Imai and Sinichiro Kobayashi). They were supervised
by three teachers, Otto Künzli, Kazuhiro Itoh, and Joke Brakman.
The students not only made a joint exhibition which travelled to Munich
and Amsterdam after running in Tokyo, but they also discussed each others
work and contemporary jewellery, and they made a conceptual beach jewel,
called "Jewelry Tide". During their Japanese stay the students
delved into their motives and ideas, and although the earth didn't quake,
they did make discoveries that turned their ideas about jewellery upside
down. They might have been the first generation of jewellery makers who
were confronted with 'globalisation' in jewellery, who discovered that
there is a kind of a world-wide phenomenon called contemporary jewellery,
no matter cultural and individual differences - no matter the discovery
of a typical 'Rietveldian', Japanese or Munich approach. And the audience
in all three countries was witness to this.
Now Ela Bauer and Karin Seufert decided to make a sequel to this project.
Surprisingly only one of the former Japanese students, Teruo Akatsu, is
still working independently as a jewellery maker like his European colleagues.
However these seven artists show how their striving to find an individual
language at that time, is a promise that has been fulfilled. The question
whether the work is made in Amsterdam, Munich or Tokyo seems rather irrelevant
today. The world of jewellery has become a global village.
Liesbeth den Besten, 6 April 2006