Dunja Herzog: The Word For World Is Forest

8 April - 8 May 2016
Opening: Friday 8 April, 17 hrs
Location: 1646, Boekhorststraat 125, The Hague
Open: Thursday - Sunday, 13-18 hrs
More info: 1646.nl

Part of Attempts to Read the World (Differently)

1646 (Project space for contemporary art) in The Hague presents the solo exhibition The Word For World Is Forest by the artist Dunja Herzog. The exhibition has been realised in cooperation with Stroom Den Haag as part of the program Attempts to Read the World (Differently), developed by Stroom Den Haag.
 
In The Word For World Is Forest Dunja Herzog explores the notion of living in a world that we do not fully understand, where things are lost in translation and we experience our own vulnerability. Herzog likes to create environments made of everyday junk. Sometimes they are the home landscape of some indefinable entities whose nature and function remain unclear. Climbing and trailing vines and the flickering of disco LED lights create a sensorial energising vibe at 1646. This world breathes the atmosphere of the bustling jungle combined with the rubbish of the urban environment, familiar and strange, like a parallel world with a logic of its own.
 
The invitation to participate in Attempts to Read the World (Differently) offered an opportunity for Dunja Herzog to connect to the work of the Austrian born artist and Yoruba priestess Susanne Wenger (1915-2009). Wenger devoted most of her life to the preservation, revival, and promotion of the cultural heritage of the Yoruba culture in Nigeria. She worked together with other artists on the restoration of Yoruba shrines in the forest groves where the shrines, nature and her own sculptures all became part of this sacred environment. The fusion of art and religion is at the core of Wenger's art and she saw it her purpose to protect the sacredness of nature. Still using a modernist mode of art construction for her reinventions in Yoruba tradition, Wenger merged her holistic worldview into her ‘archisculpture', which she no longer regarded as autonomous sculpture but as a translation of the messages of the Yoruba deities.
 
For Dunja Herzog, Wenger functions as a mediator offering a different perspective through which to read global developments and the history of art. Wenger offers Herzog a way out of thinking in binary oppositions of self and other, opting for the contagious travel of ideas and thoughts, and accepting that what is lost and gained in translation.

The Word For World Is Forest is a collaboration between 1646 and Stroom Den Haag. Dunja Herzog takes part in Attempts to Read the World (Differently) developed by Stroom Den Haag in collaboration with the artists Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Céline Condorelli, Dunja Herzog and Neïl Beloufa. They take first steps in a different reading, interpretation and imagining of the world, the recalibration of a navigation system in the midst of a change of era, the search for new forms of knowledge, information and communication. Parallel toDunja Herzog's presentation in 1646, Stroom Den Haag presents  the exhibition Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi with a.o. Céline Condorelli (6 April - 3 July 2016).

EXTRA EVENTS
Sunday 17 April 2016, 12-15.30 hrs
Brunch, music, performances and talks
Locations: Stroom Den Haag (start) and 1646 (finish)
Céline Condorelli and Dunja Herzog are two of the four artists Stroom invited to contribute to the program Attempts to Read the World (Differently). Céline's work in Another Reality is part of this program, and so is Dunja Herzog's current exhibition at 1646. As part of ARW(D) Stroom joins forces with 1646 to organize a Brazilian brunch with pão de queijo and pãozinhos gravidos (cheese balls and pregnant sandwiches), Brazilian Bocca-coffee by Lola Bikes & Coffee, and music, performances and talks with and by Céline Condorelli, Martin La Roche, Maaike Lauwaert and Eric Peter. The program starts at Stroom, 12.00 to 14.00 hrs and continues at 1646 from 14.00 to 15.30 hrs
 
Thursday 5 May 2016, 19 hrs at 1646
'Background Evening' with Dunja Herzog
More information on the website of 1646.

PRESS
Villa Next Door, 18 April 2016
de Volkskrant, 15 April 2016 (in Dutch)

08 Apr '16 - 08 May '16
1646, Boekhorststraat 125, Den Haag
Entrance: free