Image: Opening Koloniaal Instituut in Amsterdam door HM de Koningin, 9 oktober 1926. © KIT, Amsterdam.



Duet for Cannibals
15 January, 18 February, 31 March, 28 April 2010
Films, videos & talks at the Tropentheater in Amsterdam

Duet for Cannibals is a monthly screening and discussion program on colonialism and cannibalism as forms of cultural appropriation. It brings together a selection of works by contemporary artists and filmmakers as well as footage from the Tropical Museum's archive. Comprising videos, films, slideshows and performative talks by Raimond Chaves, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Ossama Mohammed, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Andy Warhol and Ming Wong among others. Curated by Inti Guerrero

Anthropologic and ethnographic institutions in European colonial power centres, like the former Colonial Institute of Amsterdam (nowadays the Royal Tropical Institute), were founded to study and exhibit the culture of 'overseas people'. Their role was to appropriate, classify, and display cultural artifacts and sometimes even human beings. Though they claimed to reveal the pre-supposed cultural essence of the non-European other, such displays further entrenched the stereotypes of a eurocentric scientific and cultural status quo. In other words, it was by means of inclusion of other cultures rather than their exclusion, that the colonial power constructed and affirmed itself within the enlightened modern institution, enhancing a privileged position from where it could unilaterally represent the rest of the world. The works in 'Duet for Cannibals' present a wide range of approaches to this debate by departing from historical strata of colonial archives, post-war cultural imperialism and countercultural forms of metropolitan creole-subcultures. The screenings are accompanied by Q&A sessions with guest artists, lectures and discussions.

The title is borrowed from a 1969 film directed by American author and critic Susan Sontag.


PROGRAM

18 February 2010, 20h:
'Cannibalizing Popular Culture'

Tropenmuseum Collection, At Home in the Dutch East Indies: The Life of Europeans (Thuis in Indie: Het leven der Europeanen), Java Sumatra period 1912-1941, 6 min. film footage
Ming Wong (SG), Life of Imitation, 2009, 4 min. video-diptych (single screen version)
Christodoulos Panayiotou (CY), Wonderland, 2008, 10 min. slideshow
Hans Heijnen (NL), Rockin' Ramona, 1991, 10 min excerpt, documentary
Raimond Chaves (PE), El Toque Criollo, 2005, 45 min. lecture

At Home in the Dutch East Indies: The Life of Europeans (Thuis in Indie: Het leven der Europeanen) — Tropenmuseum Collection, Java Sumatra period 1912-1941, 6 min. film footage
Produced by the former Colonial Institute of Amsterdam (nowadays Royal Tropical Institute), this short documentary intends to depict 'European/Metropolitan' life established by colonial rule in the Indonesian archipelago. Starting with a scene where a Dutch housewife buys food from an Indonesian peasant, who arrives to her house entrance with traditional baskets full of vegetables and spices, the film footage rapidly centers around a popular Western bourgeois leisure activity of the epoch: High tea houses. Explicitly showing the distinction of class and race within Dutch-Indonesian colonial society, the film 'At Home in the Dutch East Indies' seems to be a governmental propaganda to recruit more Dutch families to move to their colonies.

Ming Wong (Singapore 1971, lives and works in Berlin)
Originally commissioned for the 53rd Venice Biennale for the artist's solo exhibition at the Singapore Pavilion, 'Life of Imitation' is inspired by a scene from the classic Hollywood melodrama by Douglas Sirk, 'Imitation of Life' (1959) when a black mother meets her mixed-race daughter who has been running away from her true 'identity'. Ming's version features three male actors from the three main ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay and Indian) who take turns playing the black mother and her 'white' daughter. The identity of the actor for each role changes constantly with each shot.

Ming Wong's work has been shown at the Singapore Art Museum, Kunstverein in Duesseldorf, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, ZKM centre for art and media, in addition to many other galleries and institutions in South Asia and Europe. He is a graduate of Slade School of Art, University College London, 1997-99. Wong obtained his BFA at the Nanyang Academy, Singapore, and is a former resident fellow of Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Christodoulos Panayiotou (Limassol 1978, lives and works in Berlin)
'Wonderland', color slides, realized with the collaboration of the Municipal Archives of the City of Limassol, Cyprus, is the outcome of extensive research in the historical archives of the city of Limassol, pointing out the 'obsession' of Limassolians to disguise themselves as Disney characters during their annual carnival parade. The work covers the period from the late '70s up to the present and renegotiates the historic and political narrative of this important social event.

In 2005 Panayiotou won the 4th DESTE Prize from the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Athens, Greece. He has recently exhibited at The Museum Of Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2006; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2007; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center Istanbul, 2006; and Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2007.

Hans Heijnen (Sittard 1957, lives and works in the Netherlands)
The first sounds of Rock&Roll produced in Holland were by "Indos"; Dutch-Indonesians who fled their homeland when Indonesia became independent from the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Through culture clashes, affinity with American rock 'n' roll, black-American guitar-orientated music and their 'Asian touch', a unique sound developed into the best Europe had to offer. Starring legendary Indo-rock bands like The Tielman Brothers, Javelins, Crazy Rockers, Black Dynamites and Black Magic, 'Rockin' Ramona' brings us back to a moment of both post-war and post-colonial cohesion and tension at times of a new world order where Rock was expanding globally, not to say inherently imperially, but always manifested with a certain locality.
Hans Heijnen (Sittard, 1957) studied political sciences in Nijmegen and later enrolled at the The Netherlands Film and Television Academy (NFTA). His documentary films were awarded with several nominations: 'Rockin' Ramona', the first long documentary Heijnen produced received immediately the Gouden Kalf nomination at the Dutch Film Festival in 1991. He has also directed among others, 'The Surinamese Legion, 2004' a documentary about the Surinam professional football players in the Netherlands, between 1954 until 2000.

15 minutes break

Raimond Chaves (Bogota 1963, lives and works in Lima)
'El Toque Criollo' is a lecture with multimedia presentation about political, historical, social and cultural issues of Latin America as exemplified by the images of old record covers bought in Latin American flea markets. This humorous lecture gives context to the LP images that are projected while music is played from the popular genres: ranchera, cumbia, salsa, and merengue, which serve as a historiographic disembodiment of semiotics. The hardcore stories range from how music bands appropriated the aesthetics of political agitation resulting in lyrics and imagery directly or indirectly connected to repression within dictatorships: Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rural insurgency, drug cartels, and American pop influence. The artist's presentation reveals yet other post-colonial traumas where racism and sexism mark the form of cultural representation.

The work of Raimond Chavez is part of international collections like Tate Modern, London, and MUCAC in Leon. He has been part of the 27th Sao Paulo Bienal: How to live together, and Trienal Poligrafica de Puerto Rico, among many others.

Followed by a Q&A discussion



15 January 2010, 20h:
'Encounters with Empires'

Tropenmuseum collection and Tungsten Studio, Missionaries in Papua, 2007, 8 min. documentary
Jose Alejandro Restrepo (CO), Traveler's Diary, 1992, 22 min. video
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (FR), Gloria, 2008, 5 min. video
Wendelien van Oldenborgh (NL), Instruction, 2009, 30 min. video

Snowy entrance to the Tropentheater Amsterdam	Curator Inti Guerrero introducing the cannibalistic night	Tropenmuseum collection/Tungsten Studio: Missionaries in Papua

Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Traveler's Diary, 1992	Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gloria, 2008	Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Instruction, 2009
Images: © Anu Vahtra, 2010

'Missionaries in Papua', Tropenmuseum collection and Tungsten Studio, 2007 8 min. documentary
Although the Catholic Church had been active on the Southern coast of Netherlands New Guinea (Papua) since 1905, it was not until 1953 that the first missionary post was set up in the Asmat region. The first Westerner to settle among the Asmat was the Dutch missionary Gerard Zegwaard, a pioneer priest of the Sacred Heart.

Commissioned by the Tropenmuseum to Tungsten Studio.
Audio: Interview with priest Zegwaard by Tijs Goldschmidt and Roy Villevoye.
Film footage: 'Campaign' by Dr. Vincent van Amelsvoort, medical officer in Asmat during the years of 1959 to 1962. PACE collection, Utrecht.

Jose Alejandro Restrepo (Bogota 1959, lives and works in Bogota)
Restrepo's video practice is centred on a revision to the memoirs of colonial travellers in the Americas, particularly their cultural representation of natives and nature taken as the first forms of Western visual representation of the unknown. The video, 'Traveler's Diary' (1992), is an interpretation of Alexander von Humboldt's diary during an expedition to the Andes. In the video, the European traveller experiences the effects of a psychotropic substance and the film depicts an enlightened scientist's encounter with savages from the tropics as well as his own lost of control of rationality (while being under the influence).

Jose Alejandro Restrepo has had solo exhibitions (selection) at Museo de Antioquia, Medellin (2008), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2007) and Luis Angel Arango Library, Bogota (2001). His work has been part of group exhibitions like (selection) Tempo at MoMa, Define Context at Apex Art, The Sense of Place at Centro de Arte Museo Reina Sofia, Botanica Poltica at Fundacion la Caixa and both Venice and Sao Paulo Biennials.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Strasbourg 1965, lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro)
'Gloria' (2008) is a video, which portrays a French-style public garden in Rio de Janeiro. The subtitles that accompany the piece provide indirect commentary on French bourgeois cultural (aesthetic) colonialism within the process of modernity in Brazil's 19th century republican society. The film addresses the dislocation of modernity within a tropical context.

Gonzalez-Foerster has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2009), Musee d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (2006); Kunsthalle Zuerich (2004); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2003); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002); Portikus, Frankfurt (2001) and the galleries of Jan Mot in Brussels, Esther Schipper in Berlin and Koyanagi in Tokyo. She has participated in several important group exhibitions including: 'Utopia Station', the Venice Biennale (2003) and 'Documenta 11' (2002).

Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Rotterdam 1962, lives and works in Rotterdam)
'Instruction' (2009) begins with William Faulkner's famous quote from his book Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past'. The film disembodies traumatic events of the Dutch military intervention in Indonesia after World War II, known as a 'police action'. The film's cast is a group of young cadets from the Royal Netherlands Military Academy who perform a script including excerpts and quotes from a variety of sources: personal diaries, historical broadcast transcripts related to the topic, and essays. These contributions tackle the collective responsibility and heritage of the Dutch colonial past.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh has had solo exhibitions (selection) at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Muhka, Antwerp and the Musee des Beaux Arts, Mulhouse. Her work has formed part of group exhibitions like (selection) Becoming Dutch at Van Abbemuseum, Be What You Want But Stay Where You Are at Witte de With, What Keeps Mankind Alive?-10th Istanbul Biennal and In living contact-28th Sao Paulo Biennial.



40 min. (recorded audio) Q&A with Inti Guerrero, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Jose Alejandro Restrepo
15 Jan 2010, Tropentheater, Amsterdam


ORGANISATION
Organized by agentur, this screening program has been conceived by Inti Guerrero, an art critic and curator born in Bogota, Colombia and based in Amsterdam. Guerrero completed studies on History and Theory of Art & Architecture, and General History at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia and the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil. He is a former Curator-in-Residence of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and Capacete Entretenimentos in Rio de Janeiro. Guerrero's proposal was selected as a result of an Open Call by a jury composed of: Nathalie Zonnenberg, art historian and curator; Eva Fotiadi, art historian; Knut Birkholz, curator and writer and Karin Christof, curator and artistic director of agentur. The Open Call was part of the program of agentur: in transit: 2008 and supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.


Duet for Cannibals

Location: Tropentheater, Linnaeusstraat 2, Amsterdam
Doors open: 19.00 hrs
Time: 20.00 hrs
Entrance: 7,50 Eur inclusive one drink

Tickets: Tropentheater and telephone: 020 5688 500

For more information contact: pers@agentur.nl

Partner: Tropentheater Amsterdam, Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts