SUMMER LAB 2019

Quintessential Pirateness in the Age of Konijneneiland a.k.a. Coney Island Adventures
Ulufer Çelik and Cihad Caner
Open to the public: 17 August 2019, 2–6pm

Rib is taking a summer break but there will still be something exciting for you in our space. We are pleased to announce the 2019 edition of Summer Lab, featuring Rotterdam-based artists Ulufer Çelik and Cihad Caner and titled Quintessential Pirateness in the Age of Konijneneiland a.k.a. Coney Island Adventures.

On the 27th of July, Çelik and Caner will take over our space. They will spend the month of August inhabiting Rib to carry out a research project exploring old-fashioned nautical piracy and the environment surrounding our space in Charlois. More on their proposition below.

Programme
(Exact event times to be announced.)
August 2: Flag making workshop with Sanne Kabalt
August 17: Rib opens for studio visits every Friday and Saturday from 2pm to 6pm and by appointment through the end of Summer Lab
August 30: Opening, including lecture performance and screening
September 8: Finissage

Quintessential Pirateness will complement and establish a conversation with the year-long programme De Fluyt en de Hoi, lead by Paul Elliman. Çelik and Caner will share Rib’s space with a handcrafted boat that is currently being built by Marie Lorenz for her project “Tide and Current Taxi Rotterdam” as a part of De Fluyt en de Hoi.

Summer Lab is an annual residency programme where Rib hands over its space to young artists. The residency consists of a production period followed by an exhibition or public programme. During this time, the selected artists become your temporary host and run the space independently.

In our first artistic collaboration, we will take a sailboat relief found in Charlois as a starting point. This finding will guide us as we collect learnings and connect themes such as piracy, modes of being, navigation methodologies, and the notions of host/ile­ and hospitality. We ask questions such as ‘Is it possible to transform oppression into power in everyday life through methodologies of piracy, navigation, and treasure finding?’, ‘How does the relationship between piracy and ownership take shape?’, ‘What are the ethics of commodity and land ownership?’, and ‘How does piracy/buccaneering construct an altered system and deconstruct the built environment?’. These questions will lead us to cultivate the related core issues in this work.

Through this approach, we will explore Rib’s space as the harbor for our thoughts, interests and a meeting place for marginalized beings like
pirates, hackers, artists, and neighbors from different walks of life. In the past, Rib was a butcher and thus functioned by focus on the knowledge of anatomy. We wish to explore how deep we can dive into the history of such a multilayered space. Our methodology takes from the notion of piracy and pirate wayfinding techniques that support navigating through the focal points of planar vision in a deconstructional manner related to an anatomical approach beyond eyesight and night vision and power relations. Thus, there is a relation(ship) between focusing on society’s glitches and residing on the margins of that reveals the potentialities of one’s life struggles. Our final aim is to present a video work which reflects on this research process based on the socio-political background of the common histories between Empires and their current reflections as phantoms.

Ulufer Celik (1992, Turkey) is an artist who lives and works in the Netherlands. She completed her studies in the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute in 2018. She received a BArch from the Department of Architecture in Istanbul Bilgi University in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions in MAXXI, VanAbbe Museum, Designhuis, Corridor Project Space, DEPO, Apartment Project, State of Concept in Athens, Yellow Brick Gallery in Athens, Litost Gallery in Prague, İnstitute for Provocation in Beijing, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien and others. Her work explores political potentialities of narrative and myth-making, supported with artistic research in the realm of archeology, history and spatial practices through film, performance and poetry.

Cihad Caner (1990, Turkey) is an artist living and working in Rotterdam and Istanbul, who works primarily with photography, video, CGI, and sculpture. Recent work focuses on image culture; portrayals of the “other”; the utilization of objects in daily life; and the ways people face circumstances such, resistance, immigration, and representation. Recently he has exhibited at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam; Hong Kong Arts Center; Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts; Galerie BOHAI, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Corridor Project Space, Amsterdam; Blitz, Valetta; and EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Caner was recently in residence at ARCUS Project in Japan and received a Mondriaan Fonds Jong Talent grant in 2018. Caner holds a Masters in Media Design and Communication from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Rib
Katendrechtse Lagedijk 490B
3082 GJ Rotterdam— The Netherlands
info@ribrib.nl— www.ribrib.nl

Open: Fri – Sat, 2 – 6pm 
and by appointment