Mogens Jacobsen
The present exhibition at West, spread over both locations at Lange Voorhout and Groenewegje, looks like a first presentation of a new gallery or a new artists’ platform.
Mogens Jacobsen
Mogens Jacobsen
It doesn’t lack ambition at all and works by 15 artists and artists groups are on show.
Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki
It must have been quite an effort to give every work the space and attention it needs, even more so as most works need technology to make them work.
Angela Washko
Angela Washko
It also means there are 15 different ways of seeing, 15 different worlds for the viewer to swallow.
Disnovation
Reynold Reynolds
Reynold Reynolds
That is hardly possible on a rainy November afternoon as every feature needs attention, let alone the excess of information about Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), the inspirer of the show.
Reynold Reynolds
Thomas Bégin
Thomas Bégin
It is clear an institute like West needs another way of seeing from the viewer than an average modern art museum.
Mediengruppe Bitnik
Mediengruppe Bitnik
Wolfgang Spahn
That is all right, very good even, but a show like this awakens high expectations for the next exhibitions.
Wolfgang Spahn
Wolfgang Spahn
Wolfgang Spahn
All fifteen works bare a promise to give more, to show more, to linger more on the subject and on the world of the specific artist or artists group.
MRZB
MRZB
MRZB
All works have to do, in one way or another, with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media (‘the medium is the message’, remember that one?), technology and the role of the artist.
MRZB
Darsha Hewitt, Stephanie Syjuco
Darsha Hewitt, Stephanie Syjuco
Although very coherent, problem is that the show doesn’t really evoke dialogue between the works.
Darsha Hewitt
Darsha Hewit
Stephanie Syjuco
It is as if dialogue is saved for the following exhibitions.
Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl
Christof Migone
If that is so, expectations can’t be anything but very high.
Willy Lemaitre
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
©Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all photographs courtesy to the artists and to West, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
Villa Next Door 