In June 2006 Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers, Hans Ensink op Kemna and I feld the need to organize more public for our visual art. We decided to start a collaboration under the name mêkh and began in the DCR, an initiative funded by the city of The Hague. At the time this building was under construction for multidisciplinary artists and craftsmen and a lot of pop-up events took place in the building. There was one little square space in the center of the ground floor where we showed for the first time. Our aim was to see if our works would strengthen eachother by unexpected contextual effects or by formal analogies or whatever. We decided to show one representative work each. We were so enthousiastic about the result that we continued looking for suitable exhibition spaces of specific character which we still do after twenty years.
The collaboration has been very beneficial for me in many ways: it broadened my ways of looking at art, my choice of artistic disciplines of which some I started working with together with Hans, Maarten and Ellen, my social abilities, and most of all we were able to make many more exhibitions than we would have alone. After some time we were also able to exhibit in a number other countries. I am very grateful to my colleagues for being such good friends and colleagues, even although Hans, who is still a friend, left us after some years (hence EX-MÊKH, the collaboration formerly know as mêkh). Our graphic presentation was done by Ben Faydherbe from a certain moment. We refer to him as our underground member. I am equally grateful that he shares his abilities and friendship with us.
