The 9th edition of the Sybren Hellinga prize brings together five artists from vastly different contexts; they come from Denmark, Goa, The Netherlands, Syria and have graduated in recent years from art schools in Amsterdam and Arnhem, Ghent and Groningen. The works they present at Kunsthuis Syb depart from personal and familial histories and comprise various media including moving image, ceramics and textile. Autobiography and fiction are intertwined in five multi-media installations conveying distinct performative elements; of watching and being watched, character formation and narration, scores and props, movement and decay.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). In this essay, published in 1984, Le Guin argues that the source of human evolution is not the invention of the weapon, but that of the container, the carrier bag. She writes: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again–if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.”
The notion of the carrier is a recurring element in the exhibition. With Sarjon Azouz there is the construction of a space where bodies can be contained and transported to a different reality; Vita Soul Wilmering and Peter Scherrebeck Hansen bring forward the body as a repository of memories, carrying feelings from one place to another; and with Olivia d’Cruz and Benjamin Francis the carrying of tangible materials opens up to various exploitative and controlling tendencies of our everyday world. Participating in a prize the nominees demonstrate an incentive to develop a career as an artist. Carrier and career are two words that on the one hand refer to content and on the other hand to movement. Etymologically the word career shares its origin with carrier, namely they both derive from carrus, Latin for wheeled vehicle. A thriving career as an artist is often suggested as synonymous to being on the road. At the same time, many artists deal with movement and migration as a condition of their practice. In the contributions to this exhibition such questions around containing versus moving take shape.
Titus Nouwens
