Hotel MariaKapel, a portrait by Katie Jane
Artists: Milan Bosnić & Milica Milićević (SP) / Jiří Černický (CZ) / Cláudia Cristóvão (PT) / Hadassah Emmerich (NL) / Eva Kotatkova (CZ) / Mladen Miljanović (BA) / Will Self (UK) / Jamie Shovlin (UK) /John Smith (UK) / plus special guests
A project by guest-curator: Catherine Hemelryk
Who are our neighbours?
We are increasingly monitored – CCTV cameras, increased security checks when we travel, what we buy in shops is recorded by loyalty swipe cards and even our emails are under surveillance. The perceived threat of terrorism harks back to the Cuban missile crisis when families would build bomb shelters under homes to protect their families from plotting others – how real his threat was no one knew. The culture of suspicion that was rife in the Communist countries remains quietly present since the regime’s collapse. Small towns have often been associated with twitching net curtains and nosey neighbours; the line between a healthy interest and something more sinister is easily blurred. In the personal realm, one’s environment can become distorted for sufferers of bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia – intricate conspiracies triggered by coincidence can become the focal point for obsessive behaviour. Sometimes, however, the label of paranoia can shroud the truth…
Hoorn is a small city north of Amsterdam that was prominent in the 1600s as a wealthy port. Within the grand streets originating from this time lie curios and traces of peculiar behaviour, such as the ceiling rose under which anything said must remain secret.
In our day, the legendary Katie Jane kept a diary during the time she spent living in Hoorn, chronicling the people she saw and the events around her.
about the exhibition
Hotel MariaKapel, a portrait by Katie Jane is an exhibition with work by ten artists, each introducing an aspect of unsettling activity. The diary embeds the works in the city: from visiting the hairdresser that psycho-analysed his clients in Hadassah Emmerichs mixed-media drawing Das Geheimnis schöner Haare to Mladen Miljanovic’s art attack – the boy who lives down the road from the gallery who seems intent on exhibiting to the point of military ambush. The webmaster corralling the obsessive adulation of 1970s rockers Lustfaust living above the goth shop, a pen pal of Jamie Shovlin, is noticed in the diary as are the British men – John Smith’s narrator who is battling The Black Tower, the architecture that is omnipresent, and Will Self’s psychologist who is following a sequence of ‘water-closet communications’.
Katie Jane watches Claudia Cristovao being held in a claustrophobic triangle of observation as the informers she is spying on turn on her, becoming locked in a spiral of artificial motions. The diary follows Jiri Cernicky who covertly eves-drops on an entire block of flats with the listening device he made revealing unsettling truths. Brought out of the house, piled and reconfigured in the gallery, are the personal artefacts of the young girl, Eva Kotatkova, who is leaving everything free for viewing in a totemic treatment of personal possessions. Nothing is known of the observers Milan Bosnic & Milica Milicevic who share their subjective and distorted views of the city, haunting hidden viewpoints with Katie Jane, as if ghosts of the town.
An additional diary joins Katie Jane’s in Hotel MariaKapel: that of the escapees and continuing participants of the recent 13 isolations art project, which took place in a derelict prison in Hoorn. In an unintentional restaging of the Stanford Prison Experiment, conflicts soon escalated. The diary contains a variety of blog entries, documentation, proposals for unrealised projects and more, from the days the artists spent unnoticed at the edge of the city proving that you don’t necessarily know what is happening next door.
Other activities
The project also delves into covert activity through extending the project into various strata of activity in the city. Geocaching is a world-wide treasure-hunting game using GPS-receivers: caches are hidden with coordinates or clues given online. For the duration of the exhibition, locations featured in Katie Janes dairy become part of a mystery cache with geocachers quietly tracing the activity and finding things hidden under the noses of those who don’t know what to look for. The cache will be placed on opening day, and announced on www.geocaching.com. After the exhibition the cache will become archived on the website.
Other activities of other groups will leek into Hotel MariaKapel, adding to the ciphers and riddles of town life and contributing to a portrait of the place at that point in time.
At the opening, readings from the diary will occur in Dutch and English. The text will remain in the space as a guide to both the exhibition and the city for visitors.