#fatform

FATFORM, 2010-2012

in collaboration with Daniela Bershan and Jonas Ohlsson

FATFORM was an art project (2010-2012), initiated by Daniela Bershan, Kaleb de Groot and Jonas Ohlsson, that challenged the idea of a traditional platform and its basic functionality. Local and international artists met, exchanged, exhibited and performed together until the apocalypse in 2012 at one of the best underground locations in Amsterdam: the rooftop parking garage Klieverink in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. With an experimental cross-programming, different audiences were attracted from various fields such as contemporary art, biology, hip hop, new media, philosophy, performance and reggae and are encouraged (or basically forced) to at least have a peek at the other.

This project was an experiment to find a form that is open enough to have space for diverse and often non-compatible networks. By not trying to minimize these incompatibilities but rather to propose a form that is FAT enough to contain all radicals.

THE ISLAND, 2012 exhibition curated by Irene de Craen and Jonas Ohlsson 
for FATFORM

In the past, distant islands represented gaps in the map of human exploration. Besides being a refuge from regulations for humans, the isolation of islands such as Galapagos, Madagascar and Australia, allowed animals and plants to find their own shapes and behaviours, creating something wild and unique which would not be possible anywhere else. Suburbs, such as the Bijlmer, are islands in their own right, with distinct structures, rules and regulations. Geographically, and in many ways culturally too, the Bijlmer is cut off from the rest of Amsterdam, and 
hidden within this island lies FATFORM, our own little free state: our own island in a concrete, urban sea.

Curators Irene de Craen and Jonas Ohlsson have asked artists with their own exotic visual language to reflect on the idea of the island and relatic topics such as utopia, anarchy, autonomy, isolation and evolution.

Present Forever is a remarkable exhibition on a remarkable location. 55 artists were invited to make work for FATFORM in their new residence, a parking garage in the Bijlmer inAmsterdam, right across the road from where they were seated in the past two summers, the Kraaiennest. Lees spacious but still big, 3500m2 or two full circles of concrete.

The organisers (for reference they are Ad de Jong and Manuel Klappe, who also organised BeeldHalWerk in Noord in 2010, in cooperation with Daniela Bershan, artist and one of the founders of Fatform and Bas Oudt, exhibition designer) hand-picked 55 artists and invited them to make new work if their time allowed and over half of them did. Their selection gives an accurate cross section of the current state of the art. Ranging from young artists to established heroes, a good dozen of the Rijksakademie alumni and a current Rijksakademie student, Bert Jacobs, whom I also asked about his work for the expo.

Did you make work especially for the exhibition? At this moment my work focuses primarily on experimenting with abstraction and figuration, with color and the skin of the canvas. Recently this resulted in a search for a way to thicken/enlarge the physical spaciousness and presence of the canvas by throwing it out of the framework. PRESENT FOREVER, taking the future and a strong physical presence as the basis, came with the 'assignment' to take a risk and to radically focus on the core of one's own artistic practice and think about what could be the direction for the next ten years; making a daring 'future' work out of that. In that sense my own practice and the idea of this exhibition came together, hoping that the work itself could get an extra dimension because of the space it would lean in. How does your work relate to the theme "present" - and future? It's not a thematic exhibition and as such it is not necessarily a relation with present as a theme, but being present and how to be present.

What is your vision for the future? Searching, developing and changing my practice What is special about this exposition? I already knew and worked with the FATFORM crew and seeing all the hard work and the progress they made in the last three years resulting now in this big exhibition PRESENT FOREVER and a great festival day with a lot of different performances and all kinds of music, food and lots of visitors was nice.  Next to that FATFORM has created space for a music studio, a dance studio a taekwondo gym and more spontaneous interludes with music, talks, smaller exhibitions and food over the last couple of months. Because of this mixture of forms and people it is great to be part of this initiative by  participating in this show. Is the ‘Bijlmer’(The Bijlmermeer, or colloquially Bijlmer,  is one of the neighbourhoods that form theAmsterdam Zuidoost ('Amsterdam South-East') borough (or "stadsdeel") of A"sterd’, Netherlands a good place for an artist to be? I think the Bijlmer can be a good place to be and I believe every place can be interesting for everyone, also for an artist. In the years that I had my studio in the Bijlmer it was not only the studio or the place that I liked rather it were the people that I met in the years working there. This is how I got connected with people working and/or living there and that's what makes the Bijlmer and FATFORM for me a nice place to be. Quite specific is that FATFORM also attracts people from the neighborhood liking the place, helping out and setting up for example a music studio. I think it's important that a big group of people can be involved in a project such as this and all in their own way contribute to the FATFORM project or the other way around. All the work forms one exhibition and the central theme is discussed among the works: where are we and where do we go from here? Another binding factor is that they are all handmade. No photography, no video, no new media. New forms, crafted by hand, present in their physicality. It suits the place. We are in a parking garage in the Bijlmer, which could be a very framed location. Still the viewer walks in and out of the garage during the exhibition: sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't. Some works underline the space and work with it, like a Jaguar spinning upside down or a shelter hanging from the ceiling. Some works deny or ignore the space altogether, and some transform it - into a gallery, a cave, a different space, a non-space, a private universe. Many of the works will only be shown here - so go, visit!

(the exhibition can still be visited until September 30th) http://fatform.com/projects/present-forever/ http://www.rijksakademie.nl/NL/resident/bert-jacobs