Lidwien van de Ven: Living On

Reception: March 10, 12:00-1:30 pm

Talk and Tour: March 10, 1:30-2:45 pm

In conjunction with the journal Mosaic’s 50th-Anniversary Symposium, “Living On,” the School of Art Gallery is pleased to present the photographic work of Lidwien van de Ven. Curated by Dr. Shepherd Steiner, the installation will be van de Ven’s first solo exhibition in North America. Please join us on March 10 for the opening reception and a conversation between van de Ven and Dr. Axelle Karera (Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Wesleyan University). Dr. Karera and van de Ven will reflect on the future of photography and discuss its relationship to notions of race, truth, and human rights. Everyone is welcome.

Ever-attentive to the shifting borders of aesthetics, politics, and religion, van de Ven’s work is content rich and politically loaded. Since the late 1990s, she has turned to ethical and political issues of the contemporary moment, focusing especially on the geographies of Islam, multiculturalism in Europe, and, more recently, Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. Lidwien van de Ven: Living On is an installation of photographs from Cairo, Gaza, the West Bank, and Beirut. A new work titled, Berlin, 12/01/2015 (das Volk) will be installed outside of the gallery for the duration of the show. It is exemplary of the way van de Ven’s images seep across political, religious, and aesthetic borderlines, of how tricky it is to narrate one’s way into the photographic image, and of the contested nature of the voice in the street. As with her other works, here van de Ven works within and against the institution of photojournalism. Like a lightning rod, its subject works to galvanize public debate. Viewers to the exhibition will find that van de Ven’s photographs require them to inhabit opposing perspectives and perhaps even question the parameters of the democratic crucible.

A lunchtime lecture series by University of Manitoba faculty will begin in Mid-March as will student led tours of the exhibition.

Lidwien van de Ven’s exhibition is supported by the University of Manitoba School of Art, theUniversity of Manitoba Centre for Human Rights Research, and the Mondrian Fund.

About the Artist:

Lidwien van de Ven is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Berlin and Rotterdam. She has received numerous awards for her photographs and installations, most recently, the Dolf Henkes Prize in 2014. Van de Ven exhibits on international platforms, reaching global audiences. Her work was included in the Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006), Documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), and the Busan Biennale in South Korea (2012). She has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2014), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2014), and, most recently, she has been working on a long-term research commission for the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her exhibition FRAGMENTS [of a desire for revolution] explores Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. It opened at the Van Abbe in January 2017.