Amsterdam Art Weekend 2017
Freddie Mercado
Performance
24 November 2017
6:30 – 8:30 pm
Galerie Juliette Jongma (Map)
Free Entrance
On Friday, November 24, during Amsterdam Art Weekend's Gallery Night, a special collaboration took place between Vleeshal and Galerie Juliette Jongma. They organized a collaborative performance evening, for which Galerie Juliette Jongma programmed a performance by Astrit Ismaili and Vleeshal programmed a performance by Freddie Mercado. The evening began with Ismaili's performance in the gallery amid the group exhibition Swashbuckling, followed by Freddie's performance in the adjacent space.
In his performance, titled Resistencia en fractura...Desnuda, Freddie addressed the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the impact of the disaster on his personal life.
Special thanks to Galerie Juliette Jongma and Roberto Paradise
Commission
Persons
Series
In 2015 Vleeshal kicked of its Nomadic Program, as an extension of its existing exhibition program in Middelburg. In its Nomadic Program Vleeshal goes on tour, organising exhibitions and other events in collaboration with venues in the Netherlands and abroad, such as Art Rotterdam, Amsterdam Art Weekend, the Spring Performance Festival, WIELS Art Book Fair, Brussels and Poppositions, Brussels.
Vleeshal is a unique center for contemporary art, not only because of its atypical exhibition space and exciting programming, but also because it has a collection. In the 1990s, under the impetus of then director Lex ter Braak, an ambitious collection of contemporary visual art was begun. This collection was intended for a newly envisioned museum in Middelburg, designed by Aldo and Hannie van Eyck. In 1995 it became clear that, unfortunately, there was insufficient political support for this museum. The impetus of collection building had therefore lost its possible context and visibility and encumbered Vleeshal. The collection had become a storage cost and management issue.
In 2005, the collection was given on a long-term loan to M HKA in Antwerp. M HKA was chosen because of the close historical ties between Middelburg and Antwerp, the museum's collection profile, and the fact that M HKA's director, Bart De Baere, was a member of the committee that purchased artworks for the yet-to-be-built museum in Middelburg in the 1990s.
The collection consists of two parts. One part includes national and local art from the BKR arrangement (the Dutch abbreviation BKR stands for Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling, an arrangement, which from 1949 to 1987 provided artists with a temporary income in exchange for works of art or other artistic quid pro quo). The other part consists of artworks by international contemporary artists (including Jimmie Durham, Nedko Solakov, Suchan Kinoshita, Cameron Jamie, Pipilotti Rist, and Job Koelewijn).
There has been no active acquisition policy for years. The collection is expanded here and there with sporadic purchases and donations from artists who are part of the Vleeshal program.