The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund: December 2021 exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly and Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art The last exhibition of The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund: Special Project 2020/21, by artist Anna Dasović, will open at Stroom Den Haag in 2022 Kent Chan: Warm Fronts , 17 December 2021 – 30 January 2022 Kunstinstituut Melly Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam https://www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/ Kent Chan’s artistic practice often revolves around the tropical imaginary. His artworks explore the diff erent contexts, politics and aesthetics of heat. The practices of other creatives often form the locus of his works, as is true of his latest installation presented at Kunstinstituut Melly: Warm Fronts For this exhibition, Chan furthers his interest into the past and future relationships between heat and art. He especially focuses on music emanating from across the tropics. Tapping into electronic music’s long - held associations as forms of futurist statement, in creating Warm Fronts he invited music produ cers and DJs in India, Indonesia, Kenya and Brazil to create a music set. Each is alike in its desire to evoke a musicality in which climate’s past and future come into sync. These productions set the shape for Chan’s video installation, which, together with a set of posters by the artist designed by Jonathan Castro Alejos, imagines a radical tropical future to come. A sonic and solar alliance built not only upon their distanced shared histories, but the potentiality and connectivity of heat. For the arti st, the tropics is already future; the future is heat. Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in the Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices por ous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imagination, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. The works and practices o f others often form the locus of his works, which have taken the form of film, text, conversations and exhibitions. Chan is a former resident of the Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18) and Rupert’s Resi dency Program (2015). He has held solo presentations at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the National University Singapore Museum and SCCA - Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia. His work has been exhibited in venues including the SBMA Amst erdam, EYE Film Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Busan Biennale, Drodesera Festival of Performing Arts and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Mariana Castillo Deball: By the position of your heart IT WILL BE K NOWN WHERE THE MIDDLE PLACE IS , 18 December 2021 – 16 January 2022 Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art Markt 1, Middelburg https://vleeshal.nl/en/ By the position of your heart IT WILL BE KNOWN WHERE THE MIDDLE PLACE IS is the most recent iteration of Mariana Castillo Deball’s suspended ceramic installations. As with most of her practice, the piece acknowledges an d explores how stories are performed and retained in museums, while making visible practitioners and makers whose histories have long been obscured. The ceramic pieces, particularly those made of porcelain and painted with an engobe slip, resemble ancien t pottery vessels that have perforations at their base or “kill holes”. This deliberate removal of a receptacle’s function as a container is found to be common practice used for traditional burial rites in the American Southwestern region. Deball further m anipulates these forms to create five imagined pieces connected by a rope, while also incorporating her 1998 sculptural investigation of the Klein bottle, a mathematical object that has no inside or outside. This formalistic exploration of ceramics is pa ired with Deball’s extensive research and mediation in science, archaeology, and the visual arts, specifically on how these disciplines describe the world. Her work also highlights collaborations, and the knowledge exchanges that occur by experimenting wit h its modes of (re)production. Born in Mexico in 1975 and now living between Berlin and Mexico City, artist Mariana Castillo Deball has a multidisciplinary practice, working across diverse mediums as well as various fields of study. After completing a Ma ster of Fine Art from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, Castillo Deball undertook the postgraduate program of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht in 2002 – 03. Castillo Deball’s chimerical, changing practice incorporates, among other mediums, sculpture, film, photography, drawing, ceramics, printmaking (including lithography, linocut and woodblock prints) and book making. In her installations and research - based projects, objects take on the role of characters in a play or opera that have been removed from their times and circumstances in order to convey meaning through new contexts. Castillo Deball’s recent solo presentations include the Modern Art Oxford, England (2020); the Museum Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (201 9); the institute formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Kunstinstituut Melly) (2019); the New Museum, New York (2019); the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (2018); and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2018). Maj or group exhibitions include the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016), the Aichi Triennale (2016); the Liverpool Biennial (2016); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). In 2013, she was awarded the Prei s der Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, resulting in her major exhibition Parergon at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin in 2014. Alongside her artistic practice, Castillo Deball has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster, Germany since 2015. Editors’ Notes The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund Encouraging experimentation and creativity at the highest level, the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund enables artists to realise ambitious production ideas. Each year, a series of newly produced artworks will be acquired by the Hartwig Art Foundation and then donated to the Dutch national art collection (the “Rijkscollectie”). The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund is managed and overseen by The H artwig Art Foundation: www.hartwigartfoundation.nl The curatorial team for the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund special project 2020/2021 consists of Sharmyn Cru z Rivera, Iris Ferrer, Aude Christel Mgba, Jo - Lene Ong and Rita Ouédraogo. The artists chosen to participate in this project are Kent Chan, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anna Dasović, Em’Kal Eyongakpa, Family Connection (Jörgen Gario, Quinsy Gario, Caldron Lew is, Whitney Lewis, Gala Martinus, Glenda Martinus and Rudsel Martinus), Ana Guedes, Ola Hassanain, Neo Matloga, Kevin Osepa, Maria Pask, Joy Mariama Smith, Geo Wyeth, Mariëlle Videler, Saeeda Saeed and Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide). For the comple te schedule of presentations, full artist biographies and further information, please visit the respective institutions websites and www.hartwigartfoundation.nl For press requests please contact: Rhiannon Pickles at Pickles PR rhiannon@picklespr.com | +31 (0)615 821 202