Author: Ruby Jewel

Sat – Sun Nov 27-28 2021
4bid Gallery, Overtoom 301, 1054 HW Amsterdam, Netherlands

All photos are generously made by Konstantin Guz

On the occasion of OBSESSED! Jewellery Festival, students of the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie open up a dialogical space in which Jewellery is seen as an attitude as much as a discipline. ‘Jewellery attitude’ extends on the role of Jewellery as the fundamental link that places bodies in relation to one another.

Starting from the Jewellery department’s ‘Linking- Bodies’ extension, the students investigate: how to think about – Linking Bodies?

The students will explore a varied field of questions, all stem from the wish to expand and abstract jewellery techniques and methods towards bodies, objects and non-objects in space.

The questions that will lead this exploration will wonder of the possibilities open up by Jewellery as a form of collectivity.

How can individual bodies engage and unify towards the creation of a collective jewellery piece? What does the act of linking bodies represent? Where does the necessity of linking and re-linking our bodies emerge? How could our bodies re-link? How could such collective jewellery practice open up the experience of the deep connection that links us to each other at all times? Does the practice of Linking Bodies is necessarily an act of exclusion of other-than-human bodies?
Could human and non-human bodies be linked, and how could such entanglement take place? Could objects become enabling connectors and foster relations among different bodies? Could ‘non-objects’, such as speech and sound function as connectors? And how would such a connection function? Could objects and non- object be linked to each other, and if yes, how?

‘ALL THAT’S SOLID, A LIE!’, seeks such questions over the course of two days in the 4bid Gallery in Amsterdam.

Lauren Kalman is a visual artist based in Detroit, whose practice is rooted in jewelry, contemporary craft, sculpture, video, photography and performance. Her work investigates constructions of the ideal, the politics of craft, and the built environment through performances using her body.

Raised in the Midwest of the United States, Kalman completed her MFA in Art and Technology from the Ohio State University and earned a BFA with a focus in Metals from Massachusetts College of Art.

Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Cranbrook Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Mint Museum, World Art Museum in Beijing, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Françoise van den Bosch Foundation at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and the Korean Ceramics Foundation.

2021