You can read more about the move here!
This year you will visit TENT for the last time in their current building on Witte de Withstraat. In 2024 they will start the year with two special solo exhibitions by Rotterdam artists, Robert Glas and Pris Roos. Read more below!
Glass immerses visitors in a moving exploration of the dehumanizing prison system with a 1-on-1 model of a cell from Rotterdam's Schie prison. Two films are shown along with the installation in which you can stay. Roos shows a unique collection of nine life-size portraits painted on cardboard boxes from her parents' shop. Visitors are introduced to her muses through sound fragments of intimate conversations.
"Justice beyond Revenge—Recalling Louk Hulsman" is the solo exhibition by Robert Glas with Anke Bangma as curator. In this solo exhibition, Robert Glas questions our views on punishment and justice. The current focus on zero tolerance and strict punishments seems unchallenged, but it is not. Until the mid-1980s, there was a lively public and political debate in the Netherlands about which forms of justice would help society in the longer term. Its leader was the Rotterdam abolitionist and legal scholar Louk Hulsman. With his two installations, Glas wants to breathe new life into a discussion that was actively forgotten.
"What it is, what it means and what I would like it to be" is the solo exhibition of Pris Roos with Curator Honey Kraiwee. The women and non-binary people portrayed, all familiar faces from Roos' own circle, serve as muses for this special collection. Visitors get to know the people through short audio fragments in which Roos has vulnerable conversations with them. Family, growing up, immigration, queerness, gender and gender transition are intimate themes explored in these conversations.
The conversations took place in a place where the subjects feel at home, the same place where they were captured. The exhibition invites you with images and sound into the personal living environment of the portrayed. Immortalized on cardboard are Bibi Fadlalla, Merel Dap, Fyn Paulina Bonita, Xiang Yu Yeung, Sofia Boschat-Thorez and daughter Nour, Jay Reeberg, Eileen Felida, Yin Yin Wong and Kaoutar Gadir, all active in the Rotterdam art and culture world.
Roos and curator Honey Kraiwee talk about the purpose behind the exhibition: “We hope that this exhibition appeals to you, that you feel heard and that it encourages you to find and build your own family. Your presence is what turns this collection of stories into a community. This exhibition is more than a showcase; it is a gesture of solidarity and a shared exploration of the in-between.”
Both exhibitions officially open on Friday, January 26 with an event, but can be seen from Thursday, January 25. After the last day on April 21, TENT will not close its doors yet and there will be a final performance called 'Funeral Ecstacy' with Hipsick on April 25-26. Later in 2024, the platform for Contemporary art will move into the new location at Coolhaven in Rotterdam West with new energy and vision.
TENT will move from Witte de Withstraat to Rotterdam's Coolhaven Island to build a new programme from that home base. Think of exhibitions and activities in their own space, but also co-productions, collaboration partners and fellow citizens in other places in the neighbourhood and the city, where artistic practices can be meaningful in many ways.