WEPHOST #4: ARCADE. Playground for art criticism | 2 November 2023
INCLUDING STRUGGLES. The vulnerable fringes of professionalism
17:30-20:30 | Free entrance | Offered dinner break + drinks available at WEP bar.
Seriousness and playfulness, art and criticism meet sometimes clashing, sometimes blurring their boundaries each time ARCADE comes up with a new performative event. (Or they just leave you in confusion, also very fine!)
ARCADE offers you a journey to reflect on the evergreen dilemma (or avant-gardist paradigm) of “art and life”. Tackled as the mesh of the personal and the professional within the art field, this topic will pose criticism on the fringes of professionalism and amateurism and reflect on the fences of the professional system, as well as the potential freedom offered by the amateur’s position.
It will be personal, it will be vulnerable. With a program that revisits earlier formats but with new friends joining, we gladly invite you to come with us and discover new ways to share your experiences and thoughts. Get connected: enter the ARCADE!
Program
Doors open at 17:30, following are these contributions:
> Healing the Panel. Allowing the personal in public talks – with Maartje Terpstra and friends
> A Large Cup yet Little Liquid – with Dinnis van Dijken
> I, You, the Amateur – with Elisabetta Cuccaro and Kaya Erdinç
> It is my persona(l) – by Cecilia Fox
Curious to know more details about the program? Stay tuned and follow us on Instagram @the.arcade.collective
About
ARCADE is a collective project carried on by Elisabetta Cuccaro, Maartje Terpstra, Dinnis van Dijken, and Cecilia Fox. ARCADE is open to anyone interested in challenging the boundaries of art and criticism.
Do you have any questions? Get in touch with WEP (voorzitter@stichtingwep.nl) or ARCADE (info.arcade.collective@gmail.com).
With (and not limited to) the participation of:
Elisabetta Cuccaro writes about art and collaborates with emergent artists. Whatever concerns the epistemologies of the arts is her passion, as much as creating new notions and schemes to describe herself and -beware- anything else. Among other stuff, she researches exhibition-making as an art practice and the genealogies of contemporary art.
Maartje Terpstra is a Groningen based artist +/= activist +/= researcher. Working with words she experiments with the immaterial impact of artistic creation and experience. Maartje is a serious fool. She struggles with boundaries and messes with rules.
Dinnis van Dijken is a visual artist, writer, and art critic. He is interested in the role of art within society and works to blur and short-circuit the ways in which we perceive and understand art as it is today.
Cecilia Fox is an internet-based alter ego who embraces amateur aesthetics and DIY technologies. She playfully incorporates scientific research methods, marketing strategies, and pop cultural references. Combining contradictory elements, her work showcases vulnerability alongside cynicism, autobiography intertwined with fiction, and seamlessly blends the obnoxious with the self-conscious, spontaneous with scripted. Through her works she explores her own identity and self-presentation as a woman and an artist.
Kaya Erdinç is an amateur artist, writer and gardener. He is based in Houthem St. Gerlach, a Dutch village named after a 12th century hermit who supposedly received protection from Hildegard von Bingen. He sees poetry as a compass through which to relate to questions of intimate revolt and our ever-changing experience of privacy. His work as a gardener helps him to actively engage with the aesthetic-political issues that further underlie the private and public spheres in which he dwells.