40 Titles
art project
Art project addressing human aspects of nation states, focusing on identity, power structures and geopolitical realities in relation to (city) landscape. The project unfolds across video, installation, public interventions and total environments, developed over several years and across multiple locations.
The project originated under the working title Made in China (2012) and evolved into its current form during a later work period at the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen in 2014.
'Made in China' - the video
A digital video work that marks the conceptual beginning of the project.
The project began in 2012 with the digital video work ‘Made in China’, created for a public video event at the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen. The work was constructed from online photographs of iconic Chinese landscapes, images made by people from different parts of the world and circulated on the internet. These photographs have become part of a global visual imagination, forming a mythic idea of China that exists alongside, but not in relation to, lived reality. Through digital processing, their individual characteristics were removed and transformed into uniform, painterly red‑and‑white surfaces with a threadlike texture. Sequenced into a continuous slideshow, they formed a video in which the surface appears woven, oscillating between a romantic, almost ornamental quality and something distinctly fleshy. In this shift from depiction to texture, the distance between myth and reality becomes a visual condition rather than a narrative one.
This work extends a longer trajectory within the artist’s practice that addresses human realities within geopolitical conditions, focusing on identity, borders, power structures and their relation to (city) landscape. This line of inquiry began in 1996 with the interactive installation ‘Triple Jump’ , developed in response to the events in Srebrenica and the shifting political landscape following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Within this broader framework, the research expanded toward intercontinental relations shaped by trade, wealth and socio‑political dynamics between China and Europe.
'Made in China' - the installation
The video expanded into a sculptural environment combining red clothing, sound and a shipping container.
'Made in China' was developed for a site‑specific presentation in a shipping container placed on the central square of ’s‑Hertogenbosch in 2012. The installation brought together the digital video, ninety kilograms of red clothing and an audio composition built from existing sounds that evoke Chinese percussive traditions. The red clothing formed a sculptural landscape that echoed the mountain formations appearing in the video, while the container introduced the infrastructural context through which goods and people circulate across borders. The installation brings this infrastructure into direct proximity with the everyday materials of Western consumption, exposing the gap between lived comfort and the human realities that underpin it. Within this setting, the garments, the video and the sound operate in relation to the mechanisms through which exploitation is organised and maintained across borders.
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100% Integrity - public intervention
A site‑specific intervention exploring value, authenticity and consumer culture.
100% Integrity was a public intervention realised in the commercial centre of Haarlem. The work brought together handmade gold bars stamped with historical and institutional symbols, including Rembrandt and NATO, alongside the inscription ‘100% Integrity’. These bars were displayed in relation to stacks of red clothing placed in a shop window adjacent to a clothing store. The intervention positioned these materials within the visual economy of the shopping street, placing notions of value, authenticity and cultural identity in direct proximity to the everyday circulation of consumer goods.
In addition to the gold bars, the text ‘100% Integrity’ was imprinted on small hand‑formed objects made from ultra‑light modelling clay. Their surfaces retained the traces of shaping by hand, while their presentation in clear plastic containers echoed the display language of jewellery and other valuables. Within this setting, the gold bars, the stamped objects and the garments operated as interconnected elements within the broader mechanisms through which value is constructed, traded and reproduced.
Position 1
The moment where the red clothing shifts from material to body, initiating a new sculptural language.
Within the ’40 Titles’ project, ‘Position’ articulates how power shapes and divides the body through spatial configuration, forced posture and gradual collapse. ‘Position’ embodies the moment within ’40 Titles’ where the body becomes visible as a site of power, coercion and positionality, not through representation, but through how a form is placed, divided, burdened and held under pressure in space. The former public‑urinal architecture functions as an existing structure of power; by dividing the body across two cubicles, the space itself becomes a mechanism of separation, control and restriction. The slow sagging makes power visible as something that not only positions, but also exhausts, burdens and ultimately causes collapse.
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Move
A sculptural installation in which red clothing becomes part of a construction that shifts between figure and mechanism.
As part of the 40 Titles Project, Move contributes to the project’s broader investigation into identity, power structures and their spatial manifestations. It does so by materialising these questions through a constructed movement‑based installation that makes power, action and their spatial consequences physically visible.
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40 Titles – artist books
Developed during a public space intervention in Xiamen (2014), this set of forty artist books emerged through direct encounters in the streets. Forty individuals contributed a title, generating forty distinct points of entry into the work. It is a practice that emerges in interaction with its surroundings and invites influences from outside.
40 Titles I - total installation
The presentation in the gallery of the CEAC (2014) was a total installation created out of the material resulting of the work period. Built up out of several autonomous elements it also contained materials and objects that played a part in my stay. Like for instance food packages, the box of the new stove that got installed in the studio, pruning waste from the coconut trees I photographed in the main road, alongside the beach of the peninsula, and waste material the tide brought in. But also furniture from the studio like a chair and a table, recurring objects that become part of my work. Also included a new digital video painting, having in mind traditional Chinese ink painting while doing so. And photography, as a result of long and slow hikes through this 3 million people city. The main structure of the installation marked a large square, made of Chinese clothes lines that were used in site specific interventions. The structure mimicked the architecture of the temples are buildI visited. Where the lines met the floor, they marked another square; a rhombus. The curly ends reminding of the expanding tree roots, characteristic for the tropical environment. For trees are also an important recurring theme in my work.
The way the elements were structured within the whole of the installation, echoed the local city architecture, in which everything may coincide and is extendable for collective or individual needs, like the way city gardening is implemented: sometimes recognisable and well structured, other times unrecognisable united in a seemingly unstructured environment. This way even the open office of the gallery was incorporated into the total. During the work period, a lot of thought went into notion about difference and similarity which lead to create some sort of (ostensible) balance within the installation. There were no clear boundaries. And natural and artificial material, shaped by the powers of nature, were displayed among artistic creations.
40 Titles II - total installation
In 2015 large total installation '40 Titles II' was presented at Cacaofabriek in Helmond, NL, covering the entire main exhibition hall with sculptural video installations, objects and (digitally modified) photographic work. Here a lot of the material gained during the residency was worked out. Also previous work. The idea of a borderless state of existence was taken to a maximum. It existed of several installations, two and three dimensional work.
The Columbarium
Sculptural video installation 'The Columbarium' exists of several components and media in the form of video, construction of tables, various (photographic) objects.
Click image above for more and about.
continuation...
Although '40 Titles' project is no longer actively developed, elements from the project continue in series that came into existence during this project. Like for instance the 'Position' series. Continue by clicking HERE
Made in China | The next Generation
Total installation 'Made in China | The Next Generstion' combines previously realised works during the '40 titles' project with new items. More and about: click image above.