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Michael Blum Exodus 2048 2008

■ Be(com)ing Dutch Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven

May 24 to September 14

Like many of his predecessors, the director of the Van Abbemuseum, Charles Esche, has taken on the challenge of realigning the role of the museum as a contemporary site of public debate, one that is in dialogue with its history, its location and most importantly its present time. ‘Be(com)ing Dutch’ brings things right up to date with the central issue of Dutch identity at a time when fear and anxiety are representative of a much wider and more general crisis in national identity in the face of economic globalisation, cross-culturalisation, immigration and its challenges. Co-curated by Annie Fletcher, ‘Be(com)ing Dutch’ is a twoyear programme of workshops, discussions, debates, events and publications. The project adopts the currently ubiquitous biennale model of the discursive event, where a surplus of discussion is matched by an interest in the dispersal of ideas, of presentation and multiple events. Phase one took place in January 2007, with a weekend gathering of talks, debates and presentations followed by the Eindhoven Caucus – four weeks of intensive discussions and lectures by artists and thinkers from across the world – some of whom have been invited to contribute to an exhibition of works by 35 Dutch and international artists. ‘Be(com)ing Dutch – the Exhibition’ was divided into three sections, within and beyond the museum. Works were categorised within the overlapping temporalities of the ‘Imaginary Past’, ‘Imaginary Present’ and ‘Imaginary Future’. I began in the ‘Imaginary Past’ with Gerrit Dekker’s What is more desolate than speechless water?, 2008, a grainy wall-pasted poster image of a solitary boatman travelling up the Godavari River, India. Was it a

lonely or an intimate voyage of discovery? The image was suggestive rather than descriptive – an encounter with the general rather than a specific self or place. Accompanying Dekker was a selection of photographs from 1955-63 by Ed van der Elsken, each showing a diversity of citizens looking back at the camera from the streets of Africa, Cuba, Mexico, Japan, alongside those taken in the artist’s home town of Amsterdam, simple yet remarkably ambiguous images of people carrying out their daily lives in another time captured within their (un)familiar environments. The individual optimism in many of their faces, and their apparent comfort in their chosen home, contrasted with those depicted in Johan van der Kerulen’s incredible film I love $, 1986, which documented a world where money rules all in an interconnected place of global commerce, from merchants selling fruit in the Netherlands to bankers discussing the flow of capital exchange. The imaginary past continued with two works by Stephen Willats, previously made and shown in Eindhoven at the Van Abbe in 1979. Combined Reality and Hidden Pressureand Inside the Space We Have Been Givenare two ensembles of photographs with text, produced through Willats’s now familiar visual and methodological approach. His interactive model of working with inhabitants, this time from Eindhoven, and engaging with their immediate environments is employed as a means of producing the art work and as an enabler of more in-depth understandings of the social reality of the inhabitants, the process of production and its representational forms. The work still feels fresh in its attempt to grapple with how any prevailing social consciousness is often embodied in both our interior and exterior lived domestic environments. Willats’s work was shown alongside a number of videobased installations including Abdellatif Benfaidoul’s engrossing Recruiting Identities, 2008 – one of a number of new commissions made especially for the show. Fenced in by a black tent-like structure, the four-channel video installation

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