Berend Strik
Morfine - Adriaan van Dis
Galerie Fons Welters - Front Space
26 Oct – 16 Nov 2019
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Book presentation: 8 November 7.30 pm
After a fall, Dutch author Adriaan van Dis broke all kinds of things. Casts and morphine put him back on his feet and behind the writing desk. Morphine in particular turned out to be a nice friend who stuck around for a while. Together they wrote a poetic report of their experiences.
Visual artist Berend Strik created the series Stitched body-c-prints, inspired by Adriaan van Dis's poem cycle Morfine. The series of eight works is a collection of "traces" in the intimate and vulnerable human body. Strik: “We usually experience our body as something that we carry with us. I want to show the body as an object to contemplate, to reflect on. A line of threads 'wanders' over and along the photographed body. Sometimes it looks like a mysterious landscape, sometimes a strange opera decor with whimsical - or playful - shapes, shadows, lines and colours that evoke all kinds of associations.”
Morphine soothes, numbs and has a hallucinatory effect. But in this cycle Van Dis actually exposes reality and shows what lies behind and underneath the scars. His poetry makes them bearable and imaginative. Strik’s stitching has the same effect: they soften the scars so that you can look at them.
Publication:
The collaboration between Van Dis and Strik was initiated by 99publishers and resulted in the Morfine bundle, which appears as the sixth volume in the 99 Editions series, in a limited edition of 99 copies. The bundle comes with a signed and numbered piezography, with manually applied stitching, also in an edition of 99, format 24 x 18.5 cm, printed on 210 grs Innova IFA24 Fine Art Paper.
The design is from Mart. Warmerdam.
Price of the book and piezography with manually applied stitching: € 99.00.
Adriaan van Dis
Adriaan van Dis (1946) grew up in Bergen, in a family with half-sisters and parents with an Indonesian (war) history. He debuted in 1983 with the short story Nathan Sid. In the early 1990s he wrote a number of travel novels, including Het Beloofde Land and In Afrika. In 1994 the extremely successful novel Indonesian dunes was published, about a son of an Indonesian family born in the Netherlands who is raised in the sphere of concealed suffering. Then Dubbelliefde, Op oorlogspad in Japan, Familieziek, Onder het zink. Un abécédaire de Paris, De wandelaar, Leeftocht en Tikkop. At the end of November 2011, he published Stadsliefde, which focuses on the city of Paris. In 2014, the novel Ik kom terug was published. Van Dis received numerous literary prizes, such as Libris Literatuurprijs, Gouden Uil and Publieksprijs. His entire oeuvre was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize. Adriaan van Dis's books have been translated into many languages. His most recent novel In het Buitengebied was published in 2017.
99 Publishers has previously worked with Adriaan van Dis. In 2008 the book Totok II was published, a collaborative project by Adriaan van Dis and visual artist Harald Vlugt. In response to his visit to Indonesia, Van Dis wrote sixteen pervasive poems full of nostalgia and melancholia about, as he puts it, "meeting again with a land of hearsay". With his collages, Harald Vlugt always connects flawlessly with the sensory perceptions in Van Dis's poetry.
Berend Strik
Berend Strik (1960) edits photo images with needle and thread. Stitchings and pieces of fabric - mesh, velvet - become part of his photos. He consciously calls it stitching and not embroidery. The latter is a word that he finds not applicable to his work, it implies a certain motive too much. For Strik it is about anchoring and securing something on the image. He started making collages in the 1980s. Found and existing images are also the starting point when he started stitching in the late eighties. Later, family photos also serve as a base. More recently, Strik works with "own" material: situations photographed by himself. At the start of his career, he gained fame with pornographic images that he provided with a (thick) layer of yarn with needle and thread. This makes the photos more veiled and less explicit. The "hardness" of pornography contrasts with the softness of the material, creating more intimacy in the image. It is of great importance to Strik that the spectator has a place within the work. For that reason, not editing parts of the image, but keeping it open is essential. He believes that in a completely "stitched up" work there is no room for the viewer. Moreover, the edits that he performs must remain as close as possible to the reality of the photo in order for you as a spectator to continue to relate to it. Berend Strik followed his education at the Rijksakademie of visual arts in Amsterdam (1986-1988) and at ISCP (International Studio and Curational Program) in New York (1998-2000). Strik won several (international) prizes.