On an intimate guided visit through Chapter 1NE, Rieke guides us from piece to piece. We start by Los Angeles-based artist Aria Dean, who presents a ten-minute film piece compiling “American hip-hop music videos with a specific focus on the dancing masses of people”, which aims to highlight how being in group, in community, is perceived positively by African-Americans while it’s stigmatized by bigot Americans. We continue through the mezzanine floor, where we find a LED light sculpture beneath a stair by Navid Nuur, photographs by Sanlé Sory, the funny Funk Lessons video piece by Adrian Piper, and other artworks by Neo Matloga, Quentley Barbara, and Boris Tellegen & Rich Medina, which range from recycled cardboard to sound art.
When getting to the enormous first floor, several pieces catch our attention. One of them is a green structure like a box. It’s the piece Beer, by Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout. After winning the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art, he used the money to create a video piece criticising that same company: first, in a more ‘innocent’ way, by adapting Heineken’s logo into the word ‘urine’ on the outside of the structure. Inside of it, there’s a video piece asking “pertinent questions about the current financial development of art and culture, and the way in which multinationals can leave their mark on it”, wondering what role do big companies play in shaping contemporary art and culture.
Another interesting piece is the Treasure Junk Museum by Roxette Capriles, a very young artist from Curaçao, a former Dutch colony. Following the philosophy of ‘doing something from nothing’ – which is shared by the guys at Patta and by the organization behind Het Hem –, the artist has created an installation where different pieces of junk coexist together in a mixture that is half-bizarre and half-kitsch. In another room, we find the emblematic portraits of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie by photographer Dana Lixenberg, who also worked on the 1990s iconic magazine Vibe – there are different facsimiles of the publication for the audience to check. Other installations, sound art pieces, collages, and mixed media artworks in the space are by Farida Sedoc, Sanford Biggers, the late Rammellzee, or Terence Nance.