13 september 2024, Flor Linckens
Last chance: memory and transformation at PONTI
This year, PONTI in Antwerp opens the gallery season with a short exhibition featuring two Rotterdam-based artists. Jeltje Schuurmans and Eady van Acker have completed a six-week summer residency at PONTI and now present the works they developed during this period. Their work will be on view in the gallery from 7-15 September.
Since 2023, PONTI has organised a yearly summer residency program for artists, a response to the chronic shortage of affordable studio space in the city. In February, a large-scale protest in Antwerp highlighted this issue. Through its residency program, PONTI offers artists the opportunity to create new work without limitations. They also get a chance to exhibit their work at the gallery afterward. Jeltje Schuurmans and Eady van Acker were selected from twenty applicants for this residency.
The central theme of the resulting exhibition 'Apoptosis' is memory and the ways in which our body and mind engage with the past. What does it mean to remember, and what do we store within our bodies? Schuurmans and Van Acker have each approached this theme in their own way, resulting in a mix of wall sculptures and an installation that explores the transformation of body, mind and memory. They have worked with materials such as metal, ceramics, epoxy and latex. The title of the exhibition refers to apoptosis, the biological process in which old cells die to make room for new ones, serving as a metaphor for letting go of memories and creating space for new experiences.
Eady van Acker (1997) earned her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. In her sculptural practice, she explores themes such as destruction, decay, transition, and both physical and mental wounds. Her fascination with the interaction between the organic and synthetic is reflected in sculptures made of clay, resin, wood and stone. They possess an ethereal quality and raise questions about the division between the natural world and human-made environments, including digital spaces. Her work, characterised by fragmented stories in which fantasy, futurism and biology seem to merge, has been shown at De Aanschouw in Rotterdam, in a group exhibition at Palazzo Mora during the Venice Biennale and at Het HEM in Zaandam.
