De Tijd Performance with dance and organ

Betsy Torenbos presented a one-time, unique performance.
Louis Andriessen composed a work for organ with avoirdupois weights.
Using a simple rope construction, the organist and the dancer released the cords, creating a unique and compelling ritual involving dance, salt, and organ sounds.

Encounters in East Frisia

Dear Mr. Manzke, Mr. Theuerkauf, Mr. Lesch,
dear artists, ladies and gentlemen,

For centuries, church and art maintained a close relationship. Art assisted the church in its task of telling humanity stories about God and the Bible. People were often unable to read, but they could look. While heavenly singing resounded beneath the vaults, images appeared and made things visible. Stories framed the church entrances, carved in stone; they appeared painted on walls and vaults or on wooden altarpieces. In magnificent frescoes and intimate panel paintings we learn the interpretations and proclamations of the time in which the artworks were created. In and around the churches of Aurich we also find traces of this rich culture.
Encounters 2 is an exhibition series in which art and church meet once again, albeit in a different relationship and with a different role. Art is no longer the translator of a great collective story, but increasingly describes the individual world of a new era. The exhibition comprises diverse visual encounters between church and contemporary art, but also between different views, disciplines, movements, media, and reflective starting points. The seven artists I selected form a magnetic field of directions that together can turn the exhibition into an unforgettable encounter.
For the exhibition in the six churches in the surroundings of Aurich, I selected seven artists between approximately 27 and 60 years old, each of whom has a personal connection to the north of the Netherlands. This may be because they were born there, work there, or received their education at Academie Minerva or the Frank Mohr Institute. One man and six women, each with their own vision, their own use of materials and design, and their own discipline, adding a distinct dimension to the phenomenon of encounter.
In the work of Gjalt Blaauw in the church of Wiegboldsbur, sculpture takes center stage. Blaauw works with heavy materials such as stone, wood, and iron—materials that come from the earth. Yet he transforms them into light masses that seem to defy gravity. The creative will to transform stone into something that contradicts its very nature turns it into an illusion. The lightness of the uplifting force in his work finds its way between the stone graves on the warf outside the small, graceful church of Wiegboldsbur.
Mariëlle Buitendijk presents her timeless images of stadiums in the church of Wiesens. Last year she received the Royal Prize for Painting from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for her monochrome gray paintings, in which she shaped her icon of the stadium. They are only seemingly abstract: visual constructions of bread and games, political power, mass hysteria, and persecution. They are reduced to the calm of a memory brought into image.
Annegret Kellner (in the church of Timmel) investigates the physical impact of an image. She makes the suggestion of pain tangible through visual means. With minimal resources she achieves a maximum effect. The discoveries in her search for the most suggestive image recall depictions from Christian art history: images of mystics and saints in the rapture of their painful ecstasies—images with which Catholic churches were once filled.
In the work of Nancy Pigmans in the church of Strackholt, the vestments of Catholic worship are linked with secular violence. Nancy constructs airplanes from priestly garments, which for centuries, with their splendid embroidery, have visually adorned the rhythm of High Mass and Vespers. In her hands, these visual carriers of Catholic Sunday ritual become metaphors for destruction as well as beauty. On small banners she embroiders her knowledge of airplanes—lists born of her boyish fascination. This fascination connects, in combination with what has always occupied her: ritual, the ceremonial celebration of worship.
Anja Hertenberger and Lucienne Pereira encounter one another in the beautiful Lambertikirche in Aurich. Hertenberger works with computer media, her own body, and her communicative abilities. She turned her body into a camera and engaged people in the street in conversations about surveillance cameras that scan and control public spaces. With self-made cameras she scans her view of society not only in a physical but also in a psychological sense. In the clear space of this neoclassical church, her Western European work and her serious investigative drive meet the Brazilian celebration of Lucienne Pereira, which is clothed in the exuberance of colorful fabrics and the light that pours into the church.
And then there is Betsy Torenbos. We have just encountered her dance. In the church of Middels, Betsy Torenbos brings together movements from the choreography De Tijd, which she dances to the music of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen with people from the community—not only from Groningen or Drenthe in the Netherlands, but also from Greece, Cyprus, and Japan, where she also works. If anyone creates encounters, it is she. In her work, music, sculpture, body, stages of life, and culture meet in an intense way, as do form and meaning, dance and ritual, magic and landscape. People from all over the world encounter one another in her films and symbolic language. In the quiet atmosphere of the church of Middels, at my request, she reconstructs her theatrical interpretation of this magnificent music by Andriessen in the form of an autonomous installation.
With the selection of works for the six German churches, I wanted to show that art endows the world with meaning. I do not mean mere aesthetics, although all the works are beautiful images. Each image carries meaning: on the one hand through its own conceptual existence, and on the other through the relationship it enters into with the spaces and objects of the centuries-old surroundings in and around the church. In this way, the exhibition is an inspiring place of encounters in artistic, social, and historical terms.
I thank Betsy Torenbos for her enthusiastic commitment, Louis Andriessen for his music, which he composed especially for the Lamperti organ, Anja, Lucienne, Nancy, Annegret, Mariëlle, and Gjalt for the trust they placed in me that this would become a particularly successful encounter. And with them, the audience. Thank you.
Petri Leijdekkers
16 September 2006, 6:00 PM
Lambertikirche Aurich