About the presentation & booklaunch of graduating students
The Dutch Art Institute (DAI) is a two-phase postgraduate course that allows young artists to
spend two years developing, expanding and ‘circulating’ their studio-based art (DAI private)
or their art and design for the public domain (DAI public). With its course the institute looks
far beyond the borders of the Netherlands and even beyond the confines of European culture.
This is evident not only in the nationality of the students and (guest) tutors, but also in the permanent redevelopment of the programme.
In spring 2004 the entire academy worked on a major project in Nanjing, China, over a five
week period. In the near future projects are also planned in Turkey, India and Iran. It is the
aim of the institute to introduce students to networks in both local as well as global contexts.
The 4 graduating artists
Tracey Prehay (Jamaica/Canada)
Identity and the contrasts between various identies play an important role in the work of
Tracey Prehay. Although differences in cultural background certainly contribute, she
principally incorporates class differences in her ‘transformations’ of clothing and other
‘cultural languages’.
In Tracey’s constructed context a typical icon of the Chinese worker, the sleeve protector,
becomes an accessory for stylish nightlife. By depriving the protector of its immediate
function Tracey Prehay actually focuses attention on the item’s true significance and provenance.
Her project in the hotel lobby consists of the screening of two video’s and a ‘sewing circle’.
The public will be invited to join the making of semi high fashion items for which all
materials will be provided.
The sewing circle blurs the boundary between public and private space. Historically a very
private, exclusively female ritual, the sewing circle as ‘performance’ in a public space
addresses an entirely new set of questions and interpersonal connections.
Tracey Prehay thus contributes to a complex debate on cultural encounters, the market place
and the notion of mimicry.
Rong Man Hong (Xiamen, China)
Individualism, dynamics, expansion and the renewed experience of self identity.
These themes, currently playing a major role in the rapid development of China, are evident
in the work of Rong Man Hong. In his videos and installations he nimbly plays with clichés from
both the Western and the Eastern world. The present is a rapidly fleeting moment which he looks
back on several seconds later, sometimes with a tinge of melancholy.
Rong Man Hong’s space is the place of the stranger who has arrived, full of ambition
and expectation, in an unknown world. Moments of homesickness alternate with a
burning desire for the future. One question continually recurs: who am I and
what am I doing here?
Sverre Koren Bjertnaes (Norway)
In his homeland the Norwegian painter Sverre Bjertnaes already has a number of major
exhibitions to his name. The tragic, powerless aspect of his heroes, generally artists,
film stars and musicians who founder on their own heroism, either consciously or
unconsciously, forms the central theme in his work. His latest pieces are apparently blank
canvases whose picture only becomes evident under black light in a darkened space,
revealing a kind of dream image. Sverre Bjertnaes has presented these in Norway under
the title ‘Incognito’.
A corridor in an artist’s hotel, housed in a building whose history has seen both
hope and tragedy, forms an ideal location for this work, which provides the dreams to
be dreamed in this space.
Kristen Cooper (USA)
In February 2004, Kristen Cooper produced an installation for the Haagse Hoftoren,
the Dutch Ministry of Education’s prestigious, almost arrogant building.
This installation consisted of two enormous aviaries, designed by Kristen, housing zebra
finches which she personally cared for in a precisely devised daily ritual.
While this silent performance made her part of everyday life in the building on the one hand,
on the other it highlighted her alien presence that lacked any real involvement in the normal
order of business. In another project she displayed brief scenes from her private life in a
shadow show to motorists waiting at the traffic lights outside her house, once again turning
the personal into public property.
Her proposal for the Lloyd Hotel:
“Wandering the corridors of the Lloyd Hotel, a story unravels from door to door.
From each knob dangles a segment of an anonymous, personal history; a tale of immigration
leaving Amsterdam in 1956 and journeying to New York over a ten day boat trip.
The conventional hotel media of door hangers publicizes the narrative of a 7 year old girl’s travel over the Atlantic. Her memories and experiences are told now through a voice of 54 years of age.
My Mother emigrated to the U.S. from Amsterdam in 1956, with her parents.
She was 7 years old at that time. In 2001 I entered Europe for the first time. I landed in
Amsterdam. January 14, 2005 her story appears within the Lloyd Hotel, a former
‘waiting room’ for immigrants travelling to the Americas. This chain of events echoes the
narrative hanging throughout the Lloyd. I am telling her story, which is also my own.
All 210 hotel room doors display a hanger, each containing a single sentence of the
story, unchanged. The complete Lloyd becomes a story, by placing the order of the narrative
within the system of hotel doors. The ship becomes a hotel while the hotel becomes the ship,
encompassing a metaphor of transitional spaces which are only temporarily tangible.
Visitors walk from door to door, through the entire building, and begin to project the
information from the hangers onto the actual space of the hotel. They arrive in the last
room of the hotel, where a minute light illuminates a dark room. The image of the ship,
the Ryndam, the subject of the story, glows from within a slide built into a nightlight.
It is the only material relic of a true story which acquires meaning after reading my
Mother’s memoirs. It is the object the visitor has been reading about over 210 doors,
and will probably be the image left in the viewer’s memory of this work.”
The Lloyd Hotel
The building of the Lloyd Hotel is almost a century old and has known a turbulent history.
After an intensive and diverse use over the years, what was left in 1999 was a totally
impoverished building, which needed a lot of work to change it into what it is today:
a comfortable hotel.
The Lloyd Hotel from 1918 until present
The Lloyd Hotel is located at the Oostelijke Handelskade. This is a two kilometres long island,
constructed in 1875 when sailing ships were being replaced by increasingly bigger steamboats.
The many warehouses at the Oostelijke Handelskade were named after the countries one was sailing
to: Brazil, Panama, Argentina et cetera.This is where the “De Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd” (KHL)
had its headquarters located. The company transported a large number of emigrants from Europe
to the Americas. Many of them were extremely poor people trying to escape poverty in
Eastern Europe by rebuilding a new life elsewhere. During World War I the “Koninklijke
Hollandsche Lloyd” company assigned the architect Evert Breman to design an emigrant’s hotel.
With this facility the shipping company held a winning card in order to compete with
other passenger shipping companies. While the emigrants were waiting to board one of the
enormous passenger ships of the KHL, the necessary medical check-ups and disinfections
could take place at the hotel.
1921 - 1935: emigrant’s hotel
In 1921 the emigrant’s hotel of the “Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd” opened its doors.
It was built right before the “Amsterdamse School” reached its peak. The decorative brickwork
of that style has been used for the building. Other than that the building has an eclectic
style, with art-deco and even renaissance elements. It had been built for eternity, but
already after only fourteen years it was over: emigration had not taken off the way the KHL
had hoped for. In the twenties the company was in great distress a couple of times.
Financial aid by the government and the city was endowed to help the KHL survive.
It only helped for a short time: in 1935 the “Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd” had to file
for bankruptcy.
1940 - 1989: prison
The isolated location combined with the sturdy construction made the former hotel an ideal
prison. The German occupier, who only days after the February strike of 1941 converted the
building into a prison, recognized this. The name ‘Lloyd Hotel’ therefore would get a
gruesome meaning during wartime. Initially only members of the resistance were being kept
prisoners at the Lloyd Hotel. Once the place became a regular house of detention, all
kinds of people served time there; people active in underground activities, short sentenced
people, people awaiting their trial and after the war so-called NSB’ers (people who
had co-operated with the Germans).
Characteristic of detention in the Lloyd Hotel was the fact that prisoners did not have
their own cell, but instead were locked together in large spaces. This was creating big problems
for the house of detention’s management. In 1963 the Lloyd Hotel ceased to exist as a
detention centre for adults. In 1964 the building was turned into a detention centre for
juveniles. Rather than locking them up as adults in an isolated cell in those days an
alternative treatment was being looked for. The characteristics of the Lloyd Hotel neatly
fitted the requirements for such alternative treatment.
1989 - 1999: workshops
From 1989 until 1999 the city of Amsterdam rented out the Lloyd Hotel to the Spinoza
Foundation, which rented it mostly to artists who used the space as workshops.
The building continued to become impoverished. However, the surroundings of the Lloyd Hotel
were constantly being renovated and renewed, a process that the Lloyd Hotel inevitably had
to go through as well. Therefore, the city of Amsterdam decided to organize a competition:
the building was to be developed by the party who put the building at its best use.
The Lloyd Hotel as a hotel with a lot of different rooms by differnt designers and a
Cultural Embassy, was the preferred plan by the city of Amsterdam. Ever since 1997 work has
started to materialize the plans.
The Connection
The connection between the hotel’s history and these four young artists is evident.
Two years ago Sverre Bjertnaes, Kristen Cooper, Rong Man Hong and Tracey Prehay left their
homeland to spend two years studying at the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede. Their graduation
will mark a second transition in their life, for after the exhibition they will set up
as artists in yet another location. So all four are people ‘in transit’, on a journey to a
place where they await their future. The themes in their work are closely connected with their background and current situation, that of travellers continually seeking new places
and opportunities of finding temporary accommodation for themselves and their baggage.