REMNANTS OF TEMPORALITY
Berendine Venemans​​​​​​​
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​​​​​26.06.2025 - 06.07.2025​​
​OPENING SUNDAY 29.06.2025 3pm
our House will be open from 1pm
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PERFORMANCE 29.06.2025 3.30pm
’TENDING TO DARKNESS'
Maya Irene Bolier, Nico Alaya Rivera
Elky Rosa, Berendine Venemans
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The exhibition is dedicated to performance art and humanity. Berendine's multidisciplinary and performance work explores and highlights different sides of being human and humanity. Vulnerability, surrender and absurdity recur more often in her work.
Performance art is an experience that only happens in the moment. Afterwards, it is gone - after all, it has already happened. But what remains? How can we exhibit it, to still let something of that experience come across? For the festive vernissage, Berendine is organising a performance art event in which she has invited three talented performance artists around the theme of “humanity”, and she will exhibit her latest work.
TENDING TO DARKNESS (live soundscape looping, projections and scent)
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“What does darkness have to say, when we choose to engage with it?”
Some shamans always carry a carefully wrapped object, kept from the light. It symbolizes the darkness in the world and within ourselves. Yet, darkness also embodies the ‘yet to be defined’, the potential for transformation when given space. Caring for our darkness is a tale as old as humanity itself. As Rumi's poem goes; “This being human is a guest house. Invite them in, for every part has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
Tending to Darkness is a deeply atmospheric and sensory performance, with projections, live sounds and smells. It invites the audience to feel and connect with the beautiful layers of their own humanity.
v.l.n.r: Berendine Venemans,Nico Alaya Rivera, Maja Irene Bolier, Elky Rosa
NICO AYALA RIVERA
Nico Ayala Rivera is an illustrator and visual artist from Colombia and Curaçao based in Utrecht. He is fascinated by the often invisible dimensions of our world. In his practice, he explores how magical thinking, expressed through dreams, folk tales and rituals, manifests itself.
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Performance: SYNESTHESION
Synesthesia is a unique form of perception where senses are intertwined, such as seeing colours in music and being able to taste words while reading.
Through a ritual game, Nico Ayala invites Rivera to experience language in a different way. Vowels become sounds and words lead the music, played with the oldest instrument in existence: the human voice.
​ELKY ROSA
Elky Rosa Gerritsen is a maker at the intersection of (physical) theatre, performance and visual art. She makes physical sensory performances and performative installations. Her work is intimate, intense and does not shy away from confrontation. Each performance is a new world in which different disciplines take centre stage. Movement, music, images and text find their way in conversation with the environment; the space itself, and the spectator.
Elky Rosa studied Language and Cultural Studies (BA), Literature Studies (MA) and Dutch Law (P) at Radboud University Nijmegen. She then started the course Docent & Regie at the Toneelacademie Maastricht and follows the post-hbo for physical theatre-mime corporel at Mime-Oost.
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Performance: ENIGMA
Enigma is a performative attempt to carry, embrace, erase and perhaps rewrite thoughts. A duet between head and body.
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MAJA IRENE BOILIER
Maja Irene Bolier is a Dutch/Australian queer artist working with installations, film, spoken word, collage, writing, sound, costume making and performance. A recurring theme in their work is the tension of not being able to fully control how their image is perceived, in their own minds and how it is perceived and/or sexualised by others. Through their art, Maja reformulates the narrative.
Performance: ANATOMY
Autonomy/Anatomy is a queer feminist reflection on bodily autonomy and control over how you are perceived. It explores who has power over the body and how it is viewed-and is located in the tension between self-determination and the external gaze. The work departs from my own experiences of dysphoria as a queer person with breasts, and moments in my life when having a “female” body involved danger and discomfort. Through spoken word and costume, this performance reclaims narrative and visibility, on my own terms.
BERENDINE VENEMANS
Berendine Venemans was a professional game designer, and is now a performance artist, poet and experience maker. She loves the unnameable and the uncontrollable in life.
She finds living in these times confusing. Hectic, full of rapidly developing technology and social media, high pressure... how can we still be human? What does that still mean? She makes work about learning and understanding her own humanity. The beautiful complexity, layering and the comic or absurdity of it.
In doing so, she explores the role of intuition and the body, the sensory. She believes in the power of reuniting body and mind, intuition and cognition. Her work thus invites to be experienced from the senses, to make the unnameable experienceable.
Performance: TENDING TO DARKNESS
Tending to Darkness is a highly atmospheric and sensory performance, with projections, live made soundscape and scents. It invites the audience to experience and connect with the beautiful layers of their own humanity.