Driftwood

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Back from a short stay elsewhere I found DeFKa-Research Magazine #6 in my mailbox. In this magazine essays and art on the theme Driftwood are published. I participated with a piece under the name Drijfhout (text in Dutch) with outtakes from my diaries from since I finished art school. The Illustrations are artworks that were based on these outtakes. I first wrote a thorough theoretical piece, but I changed my mind about that and I send in this text thinking it is better to show and not tell. Magazines can be ordered on the site of DeFKa Research.

An older text that I wrote for DeFKa Research, The Lying Poet, can now be read on my own site.

Cover of the magazine
The first pages

Trace of muse

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And this is the edition I made for l’Anniversaire de l’Art: Trace of Muse. You might remember the first appearance when I was having a beer during my residency in France in 2008. Or the search for her under water as a Malieveld-action off-site in France. During my research in the USA she also appeared in San Francisco at Montgomery. I even have a text on shard about her! These are stones taken from the Sorgue River on January 5, 2023. It is an edition of five footprints of the muse I keep encountering. The colour comes from pigment I got from Roussillon near the source of the Sorgue river:

Kees Koomen: Trace of Muse (edition of five) – 2023

HOK Gallery

Con alma

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Today we discovered a post of the Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid which will start in three weeks. It is coming near and I look forward to visiting the other fairs in the Madrid Art Week: ARCO, JUST MAD-Art Fair, Drawing Room and Art Madrid.
The title of EX-MÊKH’s exhibition will be Con Alma. We take the soul of the collaboration of Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers and me into the hotel room of the Petit Palace Hotel. We change it into a mirror for our public to reflect on!

Hybrid Art Fair

ART BBQ Studio-playlists

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Last Sunday my personal Studio Playlist for the year 2021 was published on ART BBQ. Rotterdam sculptor Ron van der Ende publishes playlists of befriended artists every year since 2006. Its the music they hear during work in their studio. I have participated since the beginning and always found it a nice and reflective thing to do. He also asks for pictures concerning the art practice to illustrate the page the playlists are published on which give some very nice insights of the way artists do their work and what their studios look like.

Les Idiolithes

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This past weekend the opening of ‘Les idiolithes’ took place in Paris. After the first performances with ‘Conversation with a Stone about Freud’s Correspondence about Stones’ executed by Forbes Morlock and ‘Sounding the Stone‘ by Yorgos Dimitriades the video’s ‘Les idiolithes’ by KRAATZ,  ‘Soma(2) – Moksha ‘by Sabine Bürger and ‘Stage Arousal‘ by EX MÊKH are shown for the first time on the sixteen screens on the front of the building.

Stage Arousal ( still)
For a report on the first day (in Dutch): click on the picture!

On the second day the ritual return of the stone is executed: the members of Kraatz pass the stone to the members of EX-MÊKH. After a break the performance ‘Sentiers d’été‘ is executed by Kees Koomen and after another break Ex-MÊKH’s Ellen Rodenberg gives a workshop.

Sentiers d’été
For a report on the second day (in Dutch): click on the picture!

FeMaler

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A-Trans in Berlin asked Ellen Rodenberg to make an installation in their Schaufenster exhibitions in Subwaystation Kleistpark. This season the theme of all A-Trans exhibitions is “A Femme City” dealing with the female gaze on urban developments. Ellen complied and decided to ask her male-EX-MÊKH companions Maarten Schepers and Kees Koomen to design a pendant of her installation focussing on the element of gender in EX-MÊKH.

The exhibition FeMaler will be visible from September 11 until Oktober 18 at Vitrine U – Kleistpark (U7) in 10783 Berlin.
The opening will take place with two performances on friday September 11 at 19.00 h.

“…When do we talk of a female gaze and of a female approach? What does it look like? I decided to engage the men of the EX-MÊKH-collective in this project in order to be able to hold the development of my work against the light of a male/female concept. Two shop windows next to each other, organized with work based on the male/female concept. I had discussions with Maarten Schepers and Kees Koomen about the difference in strategies, upbringing, social behavior and networking. When do we talk about expressing oneself with personal character and where do we observe the influence of gender?…”

(Ellen Rodenberg, 2020)

A-Trans

chmkoome’s blog

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I have been making an artblog since 2004. Initially it started as a digital diary but eventually my personal preoccupations about art I find inspiring and art I admire got the upper hand. I started the blog at XS4all, a Dutch provider which had been important and innovative from the start of internet in the Netherlands. They hosted an experimental blogservice that I have been using for eight years after which they stopped. After I downloaded the archive of this blog I restarted chmkoome’s blog on WordPress but I couldn’t get it done to migrate the archive to this blog. It had to be done by hand, day by day.
Now that the Coronavirus stops cultural life and the Conservatory where I work is only active online ànd anticipating on my retirement I think I will try and work on it on regular base. I will both post the oldest posts forward and the latest XS4all-posts backwarts, somewhere in the middle everything will be available sometime.

Here is one of my first posts:

15 juli 2004

Vandaag kreeg ik van mijn zwager een DVD met daarop een videotape die we in 1986 voor het oudjaarsfeest gemaakt hebben samen met een vriend van me. Daarop een samenraapsel van alles waarmee we tot dan toe bezig waren geweest: eigen filmpjes, goede kunstenaars, muziek, San Francisco andermans films etc. Ik was een en ander vergeten, maar een aantal van mijn eigen sentimenten herkende ik feilloos. Persoonlijke geschiedenis en tijdsdocument in een!

Shadowpainting – 1979 (still from a double-8 film)

Kees Koomen