For Art Rotterdam 2022 Dürst Britt & Mayhew is happy to present new works by Marwan Bassiouni and Pieter Paul Pothoven. Marwan Bassiouni will also show recent photo's in Prospects & Concepts
In 2018 and 2019 Marwan Bassiouni visited over seventy mosques in the Netherlands in order to photograph the Dutch landscape from inside windows of Muslim places of worship. The result was a series of thirty photographs titled New Dutch Views. These images attempted to offer a reconciliation in the visual domain by bringing together two worlds and by focusing on Islamic architecture and the Dutch landscape.
In 2021, Bassiouni pursued his long-term photographic endeavor and travels once more across the country in search of new New Dutch Views. Together with photographs me shot in the UK and his native Switzerland, these works form the start of the Pan-European series New Western Views.
Pieter Paul Pothoven realizes works from his recent series Consignor Consignee from lapis lazuli that he acquired in Kabul in 2009. The stones were shipped by the Dutch Embassy through Kamp Holland in Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan, to the naval base in Amsterdam.
By grinding and separating the lapis lazuli based on the density and specific mass of lazurite, the mineral that gives the rock its sought after colour, the resulting pigments represent varying intensities of the very same material—from the precious ultramarine the Old Masters have worked with, to the grey-blue dust left behind in the mine shafts.
Like the stones, also the polypropylene sacks and the crate, in which they were transported, were reworked into supports for the different pigments. By processing, repackaging and shipping lapis lazuli anew as a series of artworks, Pothoven underlines the post-aesthetic condition of the pigments.
More than just an immaterial colour experience with a range of meanings – the color of peace, virtue, the sacred, the infinite and the void – the variegated ultramarine blue of Consignor Consignee is also a carrier of pressing contexts. The dust which miners have been breathing in for thousands of years; foreign intervention in the country where the stone is mined; the Amsterdam shipyard, now a naval base, where VOC ships were once built: all these frameworks testify to an asymmetric distribution of labour, power and wealth, from which the arts too cannot escape.