In April 2023 we started a collaboration with artist Samboleap Tol. While in residence at the Cemeti Institute in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, she began a sustained correspondence with Rib, which will serve as a sounding board to receive updates and reflections on her activities.  

[Transcript]
*read in a calm and measured voice by Samboleap Tol

Today I had a shower in my new place

here in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

and I can't believe how that felt.

I felt refreshed

as if I haven't showered in over

I don't know

years maybe

The moment I arrived here,
I felt a sense of peace

but also a sense of confusion

My parents are not from Indonesia,
but from Cambodia

They had returned
and so my father passed away

and I'm only starting to understand

what their last months, 
weeks or days were like

the heat, the geckos,

it's also my body returning
to a temperature

that it belongs to


In the background

you can hear


the prayers, cause it's Ramadan

and I'm surrounded by a sound that's unfamiliar to me

but familiar at the same time

because I'm used to Cambodian
Buddhist chants

They're singing for a good life ahead

and to embrace life fully

 

https://www.samboleaptol.com/

Correspondence with Samboleap Tol # 1

Correspondence no. 2 from Samboleap Tol in Yogyakarta 
25 May 2023

[Transcript]

The temples have a dual function for me.

On the one hand, they are evidence for myself to truly understand that there were civilizations out there, who were remarkable, artistic, ingenious, and perhaps in tune with who they are.

And on the other hand, the stones themselves narrate.

Whether beyond the religious aspects, be it telling stories about Buddha or Hindu stories, I am sure that the bas reliefs also include other clues of what that civilization might've been like.

I'm not here to try and bring back the past.

I think I feel very free to remix different sets of knowledges and see what that brings to my own life.

Correspondence with Samboleap Tol #2

PZI MFA students year 1 at Rib, June 6-9, 2023. Vocal exercises.

Blue

Peter Fengler's performance took place July 1, 2023 at Rib concurrent with the exhibition opening 'The Last Terminal Part 2: The Ribbon-Cutting Approach'.

Performance by Peter Fengler

Correspondence no. 3 from Samboleap Tol in Yogyakarta
July 31, 2023

Transcript:

Coming Indonesia, everything was strange and different. 
Especially the people, I expected they were going to be disinterested. 
But it was the complete opposite. 

Once I said: "I'm interested in traditional dance or in ancient temples, Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms." 
Like, Yogyakartans were there left, right and center, saying: "Hey, this is where I'm interested in too!"
"This whole city is into this stuff!"

And just hearing that and feeling genuine interest, over and over, in my practice. 
And just in my overall interests in arts, gave me a strength and confidence I could never imagine. 

I am so grateful for Indonesia to show me a way of being an artist that is so liberating. 

I feel emancipated from expectations of what Western society wants an artist to be like. 

I'm completely independent of their thought.

Correspondence with Samboleap Tol #3

"Piano Unplugged: Variation I" is a piano piece conceived by artist Mathew Kneebone and composed and performed by musician & composer Tom Aldrich.

This is a recording of a performance at Rib during the exhibition opening of "The Last Terminal, Volume III, Part 2: Errors".

The composition draws from Kneebone’s archive of musical improvisations performed and  posted online by people experiencing a blackout. These brief melodies vary in modality and complexity, from children’s recitals to elaborate jazz riffs. Taken collectively, they convey a  spontaneous form of cultural production born  as a direct response to disruption caused by infrastructural failure. The score for the performance arranges these improvised samples according to interpretive compositional systems from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s "Klavierstücke" series, Henry Cowell’s "New Musical Resources", and Tom Aldrich’s intuitive play.

"Piano Unplugged: Variation I" is the first rendition in a series of acoustic musical works based on improvised music created during power failure.

Mastered and recorded by Johan de Koeijer at Rib © Rib & Mathew Kneebone 2024

Piano Unplugged: Variation I by Mathew Kneebone & Tom Aldrich

Has the primacy of subjectivity and the rejection of reason disabled art to comprehend and represent our current crisis? In what ways do ideologies of expectation condition art? We are excited to have continued our dialogue with Amanda Beech with the Seminar titled Representation. Ends, Means, Desires and Capitalia, in an effort to understand the genealogy of these questions and their possible implications. Amanda Beech criticizes an “inability to deal with representation; that is, how we might account for art as a field of representation, a space of knowing, that goes beyond traditional metaphysics or the ontology of art as a mirror of what is – art as nature” (p.2, Art’s Intolerable Knowledge, 2021). To her, the pessimism about epistemology and representation in contemporary art is a consequence of anti-realist positions that are concerned with immanence rather than transcendence, rejecting the idea of objective truth and rendering the apprehension of reality as entirely subjective. In opposition to this, Amanda Beech asks whether art can work in a non-subjective form of realism that can go beyond the reproduction of the current crisis. Realism is defined by her as the question of articulating that which we cannot imagine, nor have any analytical grasp on. Such an artistic methodology could “release reason and subjectivity from its negative typecasting, and (...) endow art with much needed and stronger epistemic credentials” (p.7). To illustrate this form of practice, the presentation ended with a screening of Amanda Beech's work Covenant Transport Move or Die (2015), a multi-channel video installation in which five characters who know everything about everything, having mapped out past, present and future through a game-like system “wade through the terrain of global capitalist power from a collective psychology that transcends the political stagnation of technology, industry and the mire of our present imaginary”, as it is phrased on her website. We concluded the seminar with a conversation between Amanda Beech, the audience and Maziar Afrassiabi, reflecting on the presented diagnosis and its proposed consequences for art.

Correspondence with Samboleap Tol #2

Rib Rotterdam

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