Archive Event VI: Miriam Sentler - The Chase
Looiersgracht 60 Amsterdam (NL)
October 2022

Overview exhibition and event at Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam.Copyright: Miriam Sentler/ LNDW Studio.

The Archive Series invites artists, curators, researchers and institutions from the Netherlands and abroad to participate in conversations around the nature of the archive and the impulse to collect information, ideas and materials. Stemming from Looiersgracht 60’s commitment to a dialogue surrounding preservation, the Archive Series’ is made up of unique, site-specific events investigating archives through installation, performance and conversations with artists and practitioners actively engaged in better understanding the past in our present.

For the sixth edition of the Archive Series, Looiersgracht 60 presents ‘The Chase’, a unique installation by visual artist and artistic researcher Miriam Sentler. Accompanying the installation will be a public program with Sentler’s frequent collaborators, environmental humanities researcher Sadie Hale, and composer Drake Stoughton. Sentler and Hale will perform Cairban: A Contemporary Shark Hunt followed by a panel discussion between Sentler and Stoughton, moderated by Alicja Melzacka, curator of Jester, an exhibition space established on a former coal mine in Genk, BE.

‘The Chase’ brings together three of Sentler’s projects surrounding artistic methods of archiving endangered species in landscapes exploited for fossil fuel extraction. Considering the act of the ‘chase’, Sentler does not strive to capture her subjects, but rather focuses on the reach towards engagement with fleeting sources. Methods such as translating the sounds of endangered birds into sheet music or following the legendary basking shark as dual industrial resource and sea-monster are presented in the installation as methods to engage with the changes of precarious landscapes. Sentler explores these on-going research projects through the performance, discussion and installations and questions their methodologies as (im)possible archival instruments of the chase.

Overview exhibition and event at Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam. Copyright: Miriam Sentler/ LNDW Studio.

Deep Time Agency
Gallery 3 - Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (NL)
October 2022

Overview exhibition at Gallery 3, Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam. Copyright: Deep Time Agency

Deep Time Agency proudly presents its first solo exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut. A multi-year, artistic research initiative, the agency re-contextualises archaeological and paleontological objects in (post-)industrial landscapes, in collaboration with local residents, stakeholders and institutions. The result is a series of case studies that highlights changing landscapes and found objects and brings them together in an overarching artistic project. The first four parts, Descent into the Future (2020), Concrete Reef (2022), Ancestors Rising (2022) and Swamp Palace (2022), can now be seen in Gallery 3. The long, vertical space of Gallery 3 functions as a mineshaft in this exhibition, highlighting various finds from geological layers and excavation sites explored in the agency’s different projects. The long, vertical space of Gallery 3 functions as a mineshaft in this exhibition, highlighting various finds from geological layers and excavation sites explored in the agency’s different projects.