Sonsbeek 20->24 @ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam – Abstracting Parables (2022)

Type: Exhibition Design
Concept: Setareh Noorani
Technical team: Setareh Noorani and Jelmer Teunissen
Graphic Design: Sophie Douala
Client: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Photography: Peter Tijhuis

Selected Press:
Parasite Radio w/ Sophie Douala, Krista Jantowski, and Raziyah Heath
Groene Amsterdammer nr. 31 – Lotuswortel als Ruimteschip
NRC – Met alle kleuren van de regenboog het raadsel van de schepping doorgronden
Sonic Route – Abstracting Parables

There exists a vocabulary of forms, sonicities, themes, and papers between Mir, do Nascimento, and Hémon, which they used to destabilize the hegemony of ‘the Modern’ and the formality of Modern spaces. They used symbols, rituals, music and dance, to operate a hybrid practice defying the euclidean and primary.

In this defiance, what could be the shared gestures, a lingua franca, the cipher which we can use to attune ourselves to their works, while taking the assignment to correspond with their unique approaches on the non-primary, to unfold their ‘tone’? These gestures, waves and winks and ambiguous tonalities, shades and echoes combined set the stage for the plural and the fugitive, for the undercommons to gather and view differently.

The spatial design comprises out of the following interventions:

• Grid: accentuating the ‘off-grid’, framing blank spaces, spaces ‘removed’ from the wall
• Suggesting flows and movements, countering the ‘angular cube’
• Suggesting spatial and material accents, and echoing these to form a rhythm across the spaces
• The former 3 steps define different zones for stimulating observation, intimacy and rest
• Tones, tonalities, defined for each artist, in the chosen materials and colors – breaking the white cube even further

The interventions thus center themselves around a selection of shared gestures — suspensions and rhythmic patterns to soften the rectangular rooms — to connect between the, now, sequenced exhibition spaces and offer an interrelated spatial understanding of Hémon, do Nascimento, and Mir – culminating in the contextualisation room. The ambiguous tonalities, the shades, and different spatial accents will be used to set the artist’s approaches apart, to offer their interrelatedness an autonomous, non-hierarchical and non-linear address.

As there is no spatial hierarchy of one artist over the other, there will be an introduction space going both directions. In the respective exhibition rooms, the ‘eye’ is considered differently, into the ‘hold’, the holding space at the heart and the different ways of being embraced by the works and ideas in space.