OPENING 21 April 2018 18:00
Exhibition continues: 22 April - 27 July 2018

Following its first chapter at Bunkier Sztuki, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland The Trouble with Value arrives with a second iteration to Onomatopee. Curated by Kris Dittel (Onomatopee) and Krzysztof Siatka (Bunkier Sztuki), opening at Onomatopee, Eindhoven on Saturday, April 21, 18:00 – 23:00.

The Trouble with Value discusses the tangled story of the symbolic and economic value that a work of art holds, being a product of its maker’s labour; with an attempt to provide insights into current notions of value and value systems surrounding us.

With the participation of: Benera and Estefan, Rachel Carey, gerlach en koop, Fokus Grupa, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Monique Hendriksen, Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Kornel Janczy, Adrian Paci, Feliks Szyszko, Timm Ulrichs.

Any artwork is subject to a web of assessments, expressed from the perspective of experts and audiences. Among those actors in this judgmental spectacle are curators, critics, art historians, philosophers, art dealers, and of course the public too. Institutions and the machinery of the art market complete this disposition.

Aside from the monetary evaluation of artworks and their unregulated market, the criteria for an artwork’s quality and its merit remain rather vague. Despite this fact the contemporary art world is persistently fixated on the “value” of art: wanting to recognize what is “new” and “original”, “relevant”, “challenging” or “radical”. Yet, is it possible to truly recognize what makes a work of art “outstanding” or “contemporary”, those qualities which are telling of their time while also carrying universal modes of understanding?

April 7 - May 20
April 7, 16:00, book launch and exhibition opening
16:30 Converstation between Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Pieter Vermeulen

The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar is a partial compendium of the different modes of being that inhabit exhibitions. These different modes of being, often placed outside the realm of art objects proper, are described and activated here as crucial players in the world of contemporary art. Maximizing a poetic resourcefulness, this book proposes the exhibition as an ecology full of things that are infinitely more dimensional than their ascribed functionality would lead us to believe, and creates a space where species meet, where ontological and epistemological registers clash, overlap, and contaminate each other, where the living and inert, organic and inorganic exchange properties, qualities, and performances. Ultimately this book aims to show that what revolves around, within, and beyond any given system, resolves to be just as serious and important as what that system aims to convey.

# 1 / 2 – Bus Projects Melbourne April 11 – May 5
Opening Wednesday April 11, 6-8 PM
Featuring artists Sanne Vaassen and Tim Breukers
The artists will be available for conversations every Wednesday from 6 PM. 

# 2 / 2 – Onomatopee Eindhoven September 7 – October 7
Featuring artists Philippine Hoegen and Alex Farrar
The artists are available for conversations every Friday at 6 PM.

being as becoming: liberating-art and/or liberating art is a collaboration between public gallery and publisher Onomatopee (NL) and artist-run space Bus Projects (AU). The project integrates notions of ‘the contemporary’ and aims to assert the added qualities of artistic production in our life. Does art liberate and/or should it be liberated?

In life, we operate with responsibility in our surroundings. As we progress from the here and now of our contemporaneity, we encounter various conditions by chance, conversations, technical opportunities and more. Artistic practice takes off from this practice based responsibility and releases different ensembles of conditions along the organising principles of various creative practitioners, which by offering new expressions bring awareness within the on-going newness of contemporary life and culture.

Fore-fronting this direct contact with our surroundings from within the artistic practice, this project will contest the moral legitimacy of the ethics of modernism in arts and culture, will economically contest the under the invisible hand of monetized artistic circulation, will contest the traditional autonomous viewpoint of artistic practice, and will discuss the liberal agenda of cultural civilization at large.