ART CITIES:Stockholm-Willem de Rooij

Willem de Rooij’s work is multifaceted and includes in many instances the work of other artists or artefacts from historical and anthropological collections, forming temporary groupings and creating new layers of meaning. This contextual gesture or act of framing draws attention to the relationship between cultural identity and memory, collecting and display.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Index-The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation Archive

Many of de Rooij’s recent works are reduced, almost abstract, and seemingly devoid of any explicit meaning or reference. In these installations, meaning is not produced by an object or image alone, but in the relationship between the things we see, their context and our own act of reading. De Rooij’s further investigates the relationship between images and meaning through an installation that consists of two different works that explore the mechanics of representation. His installation “Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000- July 2002)” consists of 18 large panels with a selection of photographs cut from newspapers. The installation is an selection of global political struggles, which also invites a closer look into the mechanics of representation: “How do people present themselves in protest? And who is making a picture of them, and for whom?”. De Rooij presents the images separated from their captions, though captions and sources can be found in a separate book that is present in the exhibition space. The second work is a new interpretation of one of a series of bouquet works by the artist, which each explore different formal and/or so. cio-political concepts. “Bouquet V”, 2010, consists of 95 different flowers loosely arranged in a spherical shape in a cylindrical vase. Each of the flowers occurs only once in the bouquet, avoiding a hierarchy of colour, species or type, and each individual flower remains visible within the whole. The bouquet poetically symbolises a concept of diversity and the tension between the individual and the collective.

 

Info: Index-The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Kungsbrostrand 19, Stockholm, Duration: 18/4-26/6/15, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri: 12:00–18:00, Sat-Sun 12:00–16:00, http://indexfoundation.se