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01 Feb t/m 13 Apr 2025
Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation – Notes on Hapticity
Re-Viewing sites of preservation brings together works by the artist collective Notes on Hapticity (Elena Kostenko, Kees van Leeuwen, and Hannah Dawn Henderson). Their practice comes from the wish to use artistic techniques to explore subjects such as cultural theory, history and anthropology. (1) With this cross-disciplinary approach, they aspire to create access to work and conversations revolving around past and present social phenomena. Resisting a didactic approach, the collective embraces the idea that art can support questioning and lyrical ways of investigation. (2)
Artists: Elena Kostenko, Kees van Leeuwen and Hannah Dawn Henderson
Notes on Hapticity
Founded at the end of 2019, their activities as a collective were catalysed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on spatiality, social relations, and haptic modes of interacting. Their guiding principle departs from the concept of the ‘haptic encounter’ — a theme that extends as a red thread throughout their individual practices and collective presentations.
Their projects encompass exhibitions, printed matter, web articles and lectures. Through these platforms, NOH brings their respective practices and areas of interest into dialogue with one another, often forming collaborative constellations with other interlocutors and fellow artists in the process. They seek to stimulate interaction and deeper engagement between diverse epistemologies, exploring how artistic sensibilities can meaningfully contribute to disciplines and discourses, including critical theory, (visual-)anthropology, and historiography. NOH believes that art can surely go beyond a mere aestheticising of these fields, and can uncover new perspectives, research techniques, and produce the kind of crucial questions capable of mobilising knowledge production.
In the exhibition, the artists draw on the stories contained in three distinct sites: a defunct nuclear bunker, a national archive of architecture, and an dilapidated building repurposed as accommodation for asylum seekers. Paradoxically, each of these structures can be understood as both a place of protection and violence. For example, the handling of inclusion and exclusion in the asylum center, and the political conditions that make the creation of these spaces necessary.
Through their research on these structures, the artists have come into contact with symbols, narratives, and images that reflect linkages between ideas of statehood, displacement, social and political borders, colonialism and international conflict. Through their artworks, the artists seek to ‘re-view’ these sites — staging these spaces within the perimeter of the Nieuwe Vide’s exhibition space. In all of the works, the gesture of mediating the viewer’s gaze is key – concealment, exposure and (dis)orientation are revisited and revised so as to create a greater awareness of the implications of one’s spectatorship.
(1) Anthropology: A social science about humanity and the creation of culture. In the past, these studies have often been done from a colonial context. A new generation of researchers that have brought these methodologies into question.
(2) Didactic: the theory of knowledge transfer, learning skills and insight. Often from a Western perspective.
DOC4: Artist-in-Residence in Haarlem
DOC4 is a residency location on the Scheepmakersdijk in Haarlem, where (inter)national artists can temporarily live and work. The program is coordinated by 37PK in collaboration with Nieuwe Vide. During a residency period at DOC4, the collective Notes on Hapticity will work on the upcoming exhibition Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation in Haarlem.
During their residency artist collective Notes on Hapticity (N.O.H — Hannah Dawn Henderson, Kees van Leeuwen, Elena Kostenko) will develop a public programme. This programme will feature different forms of conversational gatherings, both cradling and emerging from their forthcoming exhibition, Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation. These gatherings will explore themes that are prominent in the artists’ works, such as spatiality, archives, and community.
01.02.2025 – 13.04.2025