Michael Dean. Qualities of Violence at De Appel, Amsterdam
Once you get into De Appel, you step into small black plastic balloons, and immediately ask yourself if they are filled with some killer gas instead of air. Especially since millions of cents are inviting you to proceed, together with black melted ingots-like footsteps, that remind of black gold. Then you breath and maybe try to read the displayed books, but they seem steeped in old blood, as if they were the unknown matter of a corpse, as if they’re not crushed under the unbearable weight of paleontological totems. The exhibition quotes many of the latest news. Everything is connected, it belongs to what humans are today. Specifically, you can find these symbols and artifacts to translate the relationship between humanity and its darkest perversion, violence.
Don’t expect landscapes, colors or sounds evoking qualities of violence. They simply appear as the pale experience of separation, or distance. You will feel it profoundly existential. Walking through the exhibition, you cross the space room after room – psychoanalytic ones? – with clearly no home around – even if suggested by the finding of empty cabinets. Possibly violence is the only non-experience you can really have.
In his work, Michael Dean used to translate language into its material aspects, but if we all know that violence materially destroys any kind of language, isn’t it a paradox to think about written language – which Dean recalls – as the maximum cognitive evolution of human intelligence, while producing (metaphorically or not) its opposite? Qualities of Violence offers the reader (like Dean prefers to name his audience) the sterile spectacularity of a “nothingness” environment, specifically inhabited by the heavy presence of a concrete and non-spiritual feeling of desolation.
Towards the end of the exhibition, as a reader you will may feel violated, but you will also strangely find yourself with a sense of peace.
Michael Dean | Qualities of Violence | De Appel Arts Centre | Amsterdam | through 8 March 2015
Photos by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk, courtesy De Appel Arts Centre
[…] Dean was nominated for his exhibitions “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence,” which combine sculpture, found materials and an interest in what press materials describe as […]
[…] Dean was nominated for his exhibitions “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence,” which combine sculpture, found materials and an interest in what press materials describe as […]
[…] Dean was nominated for his exhibitions “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence,” which combine sculpture, found materials and an interest in what press materials describe as […]
[…] Dean was nominated for his exhibitions “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence,” which combine sculpture, found materials and an interest in what press materials describe as […]
[…] Dean was nominated for his exhibitions “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence,” which combine sculpture, found materials and an interest in what press materials describe as […]
[…] a nomination for his ongoing South London Gallery show “Sic Glyphs” and last year’s “Qualities of Violence” show at De Appel in Amsterdam, exhibitions which investigate the intersection of physical […]
[…] a nomination for his ongoing South London Gallery show “Sic Glyphs” and last year’s “Qualities of Violence” show at De Appel in Amsterdam, exhibitions which investigate the intersection of physical space […]
[…] were Michael Dean, a multimedia artist who was nominated for the shows “Sic Glyphs” and “Qualities of Violence;” Josephine Pryde, a photographer who often includes sculpture in her installations, and whose […]
I visited this place on my Visit to Amsterdam i loved everything about it. Amazing.