About Frans van Lent

Posts by Frans van Lent:

Moira Ness: What Remains (2017)

Her absence fills the spring
Her absence fills the room
You follow her absence around the room

A 4-dimensional absence
You follow her absence around and around and around
Her absence follows your eyes around the room

A repeated absence, the same room
(I follow your absence around the room)
You follow her absence and you find yourself alone in the room

I follow your absence around the room, repeating
You follow her absence around your life
I follow your absence through the spring

Her absence leaks into cyclical time
The slow walk around the room with her absence
Nothing in the room except her absence

Your absence is watching me
Your absence sees me watching
Your absence remains with me

With an obsession for personal documentation I have kept a detailed daily account of my online life in now discontinued or steadily fading online social media platforms(Twitter, MSN Messenger Chat Logs, Blogger, etc.). I select passages from these platforms and submit them into a repetition text-based algorithm. This algorithm selects, at random, text ranging from single words to four consecutive words. It deconstructs the inputted text in this pattern, providing a collection of disjointed paragraphs, which I then decipher. I select stand out phrases/word patterns and use these as the base for creating my piece titles and accompanying writing. The end result is an entirely new interpretation of words written in the past, during a time when the words had completely different connotations. In this new presentation the words are repurposed, creating a forced cycle of repetition.

MoiraNess.com

Sarah Boulton: Dear Alice (2017)

Dear Alice,
For Three Milks I am doing a performance where I am driven in a car very slowly from my house to the house where the three milks are. It is a tiny way, just around a corner. The drive is called Grace Slick. She wrote the song White Rabbit. The first time she was involved in White Rabbit the song was long but not many people heard it, and the second time around, the song was tiny but millions still hear it. It was as though the smaller song took a pill and slotted into the bigger one, and yet the bigger one is tiny in length.
If the drive is called Grace Slick, who am I and what am I doing inside? I am not sure.
I’m day dreaming about your part. On 1st September it would be great if you could enter the event, anytime is fine, walk to a surface and put down a piece of paper very slowly. I’m sure people would notice. The paper could have the Three Milks story on it after all, and maybe after all of this, Three Milks is like a fairytale that has undergone a transformation in disguise.
Love, Sarah

SarahBoulton.tumblr.com

Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos: Leave No Trace (2013-)


2013 – on going
​Paper, USB flashdrive
24 x 16 x 1 in each frame  (60 x 40 x 2.5 cm)

Every month, the artist is writing her diary daily on two pages of paper using a vanishing ink pen – recollecting onto paper the day’s causal occurrences, personal thoughts, private moments and uncensored reflections as they resurfaced in her mind.

Once the two white pages are covered with these ephemeral notes, she scans them before the text evaporates. In six hours, each word has slowly and organically disappeared from the page, taking away with it the weight of the content and the contribution that this daily recollection has for the present and the future. At the end of each day, all that remains are two blank, white pages, lightly marked by the pen’s etchings, waiting for the next day’s narrations.

The same process is repeated each day of the month on the same two pages. After that, the two blank pages of paper that bore the weight of the artist’s hand and personal history are framed and publically displayed while the scanned documents, the only traces that the process itself really happened, are stored on a USB key casually taped behind each frame.

esmeraldakosmatopoulos.com

Daan Den Houter: Keep On Dreaming (2017)

steel, 50 gram pure gold

A series of 16 iron cubes (11cm x 11cm x 11cm).
Each cube shows an engraved signature of the artist, the year of production and a unique number (1-16).
Inside one of the 16 cubes a gold bar of 50 grams is hidden. The value of this gold bar  (on the day of purchase 14-06-2017) is € 1852. In the other 15 cubes a bar is hidden made of iron of exactly the same weight. Each of the 16 cubes are for sale.
The destruction of a block will risk legal prosecution by the artist or by one of the other owners.The cubes are protected by copyright and by the concept of the collective dream.

DaanDenHouter.com
 Till September 3rd the work is on show at Kunstenfestival Watou (BE).

Postsecret.com (2014-)

In 2014 Frank Warren printed 3000 postcards, addressed to himself on the front, the backside left blank.
He handed the cards to passers-by in the streets and public buildings and asked them to write a personal secret on it and then to post the card anonymously.
Since 2014 PostSecret received and collected more than a million postcards.
Every Sunday a small selection of newly received cards is posted on the website Postsecret.com.

http://postsecret.com/

Interview with Frank Warren by Jack Moore of WTOP-radio:

Maarten Davidse: Six perspectives on the usual (2016)

Six perspectives on the usual (fragment).
The monitor shows a 30 minute video with typed observations by six people on Dam Square in Amsterdam. The observers were asked to describe what happens when nothing happens. The result is a documentation of everything we unconsciously perceive, but do not register.

Six perspectives on the usual is part of  If you can see, look. If you can look, observe. The work is now on show in Gilbert De Bontridder: Look at me and see what I couldn’t see (yet) at Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht (NL).

portfolio.maartendavidse.nl

Leendert van der Meer: Retouches (2015-)


My neighbour had an ironic attitude towards my profession; he doubted the relevance of it. This frustrated me and gave me the urge to reveal the importance of it. Therefore I started applying the photographic medium to his profession: concierge. In doing so, I became a ‘photographic handyman’ who uses the camera as his tool.

Retouches is a series containing photographic interventions. By ‘installing’ printed images in the public domain I refurbish objects. In this process, photography not only serves as a tool; it also becomes a substitute for reality.

leendertvandermeer.com

Marc Buchy: Fiducia (2015)


If the exhibition takes place in an organisation selling objects, drinks or whatever, bended coins have to be put in the cash register and used as normal money. Even if modifed, coins get back into their flow and classical use.

At Platforms Project in Athens: All three of us had a modified coin in a pocket and showed it to many people around.
Finally one spent it at the bar, one sold it as an art-object (doubled the value) and one just gave it away.

Marcbuchy.com