Transgressive Civilisation
Klaassen will stay in the gallery for 5 days and produce a site-specific work, Laboratory of Contemporary Archaeology. He intends to transform the gallery space into his own lab where he will collect found objects from the Whitechapel area. Klaassen draws attention to the poetry of the unsightly, the small, and neglected. He collects discarded objects from his surroundings with no predetermined plan, and subsequently uses these in his work. Often the work is created in the presence of the public in a performance setting, in which he makes no attempt to avoid the absurd. Or as Klaassen himself states: “If you catch a butterfly in your hands the power on its wings will brush off leaving just a tattered rag.” |
Toine Klaassen (b. 1973 Eindhoven, the Netherlands) lives and works in Rotterdam
Graduated from Rietveld Artacademy, Amsterdam (1995-2000), Klaassen’s daily research into ‘archeology of the nowadays’ has produced exhibitions such as Immortality Bar at Stadsalerij Museum for Contemporary Art Heerlen, web-based project: Six Films on BasementArtProject.com; the artist in residence Orbino with the project Fatamorgana organised in the shipping containers of Unit 1 at Alkmaar, the Netherlands (2006); an experimental laboratory in the group show, Sense and Sensitivity at Tent, Center for visual arts Rotterdam (2006). He is working towards a new project, Reservation, which will be part of TEMPORARY MUSEUM in Amsterdam (2007).
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