By Vivian Sky Rehberg
Fouad Bouchoucha's installation 'Landscape', 2014, as part of 'Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo'
‘Trouw Invites…’ is an initiative of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and De Verdieping, the cultural foundation associated with TrouwAmsterdam, a club / restaurant / cultural platform that, in its own words, specializes in ‘progressive art and culture’.
Located in East Amsterdam (Amsterdam-Oost) on Wibautstraat – once known as Amsterdam’s ugliest street – TrouwAmsterdam, which opened in 2009, is an important, cutting-edge fixture on the Amsterdam club scene, hosting concerts and DJs, exhibitions, screenings and culinary events.
TrouwAmsterdam, photo: Ronny Theeuwes
The cultural platform is named after the industrial Trouw building it occupies. The structure once housed the printing presses for the daily newspaper Trouw, founded in 1943 as an organ of the Protestant Resistance during World War II. It has recently been sold and TrouwAmsterdam will vacate those premises in January 2015, but the link between the Stedelijk and De Verdieping is a durable one, which pre-dates the re-opening of the museum and its new annex designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects in 2013.
The Trouw building, Amsterdam
As the brain-child of Olaf Boswijk, Trouw’s owner; Kim Tuin, director of De Verdieping and co-initiator of the project ‘Trouw Invites…’ and Hendrik Folkerts, the Stedelijk’s Curator of Performance, Film & Discursive Programs, the collaboration is partially driven by a desire to broaden and diversify the audience for contemporary art and culture, or at least to recognize the fact that there is no ‘given’ audience or public for either – rather, one that must be cultivated and nourished.
‘Trouw Invites…’ follows upon ‘Stedelijk at Trouw: Contemporary Art Club’ in 2013, which revolved around monthly interdisciplinary, thematic programs (Motion, Utopia, Data) that featured musicians, thinkers, dancers, media and visual artists, including Cyprien Gaillard, Camille Henrot, Hugh Howey, Sarah Morris, Geert Mul, Nederlands Dans Theater and Jimmy Robert. The new project will consist of three monthly episodes, which I’ll cover on the frieze blog, exploring the themes of temporality and transience, which will run until 30 November 2014.
For ‘Trouw Invites…’ TrouwAmsterdam and Stedelijk reached out to international institutions (Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Beirut in Cairo, and The New Museum in New York) and offered them the possibility to curate ambitious site-specific projects in the very spacious basement of the building. The only basic parameter was that the installations would be open during evening opening hours to all visitors of the club or restaurant.
I couldn’t make it to the opening of Fouad Bouchoucha’s inaugural project, titled Landscape, which was curated by the Palais de Tokyo’s Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, but I was generously welcomed during the broad light of day by Boswijk, who described the multi-institutional collaboration with a passion matched only by his insouciance about what might come after TrouwAmsterdam’s closure. Descending into the lower level of the club, with its grittier, yet still achingly hip interior, a few posters modestly indicated the entrance, via a lipstick red antechamber, to Bouchoucha’s installation.
Fouad Bouchoucha’s installation ‘Landscape’, 2014, as part of ‘Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo’
One enters the space through dark curtains, then climbs a few stairs before being confronted with a dingy, grey mist that almost entirely obscures the architectural features. Bouchoucha indicates direction and leads the spectator toward a frontal view by placing a railing in front of a set of thick columns, the bases and tops of which are buried in the mist. But with no visual means of apprehending distance or depth it is impossible to grasp anything but a very abstract notion of the space in which one is standing. Granted, this disorienting experience was probably enhanced by the fact that I am virtually night-blind and there were only three of us standing in the space at the time, and the club beyond was silent, but it was still impressive, in an anti-James Turellian-way.
Bouchoucha says he was inspired by writer René Daumal’s unfinished cult book Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, which was published in 1952, eight years after the author’s untimely death at the age of 36. Daumal’s Mount Analogue, which traces an expedition to an inaccessible but geographically located mountain peak, also motivated filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (1973) and jazz composer and musician John Zorn’s 2012 eponymous album.
Bouchoucha guides us toward this mysterious, remote, allegorical mountainscape by setting up a promontory from which we can ponder the possible vastness of the fictional geography that lies before us and then destroys any sensation of groundedness one might have gained by randomly puncturing the air with a terrifyingly loud blast of sound that recalls the single boom of an explosion or shot. The last chapter of Mount Analogue is titled ‘And you, what do you seek?’ If spiritual access to the great beyond was an aim of Daumal’s drug experiments, pataphysical associations, and esoteric ways, Bouchoucha’s Landscape effectively keeps the unknowable, here eerily figured as a menacing, un-apprehended and therefore incomprehensible vista, and any answers to Daumal’s final question, at a safe enough distance.
‘Trouw Invites…Palais de Tokyo’ at TrouwAmsterdam
‘Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo: Fouad Bouchoucha’ lasts until 3August 2014. The following two programmes are ‘Trouw Invites… Beirut: Rayyane Tabet’ (4 September 4 to 5 October; and ‘Trouw Invites… New Museum: AUNTS Performance Collective’ (6 November to 30 November 30 2014).
Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic and a contributing editor of frieze. She is Course Director of the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.