Reading: Paramaribo SPAN: Contemporary Art in Suriname

Spread from the English edition of the Paramaribo SPAN book, launched on 26 February


The Paramaribo SPAN project has three formal platforms, distinct but interconnected: this blog; the exhibition which runs from 26 February to 14 March; and the book Paramaribo SPAN: Contemporary Art in Suriname/Hedendaagse Beeldende Kunst in Suriname/Arte Contemporânea do Suriname, launched at the SPAN opening last week.

Edited by Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern and Christopher Cozier, and published in three language editions (English, Dutch, and Portuguese) by KIT Publishers, Paramaribo SPAN is not a catalogue of the exhibition, though it features most of the artists participating in the show. Rather, in Meijer's words, it asks "where do the visual arts stand in Suriname in 2010 and what are the prospects for the future?" The book tackles this complicated question from multiple angles: biographies of individual artists, critical essays and surveys of recent developments by members of the SPAN project team, and documentation of the exchanges instigated by the ArtRoPa initiative.




Cover of the Dutch edition


Contributing writers include Meijer, Cozier, SPAN writers Chandra van Binnendijk and Marieke Visser, SPAN blog editor Nicholas Laughlin, Siebe Thissen of the Centrum Beeldende Kunst, artist Arnold Schalks, and journalists Fred de Vries and Liesbeth Babel. The book is supported by DSB Bank in commemoration of its 145th anniversary. For more information, see the KIT Publishers website.




Spread from the English edition

Project: Patricia Kaersenhout, Invisible Men

Patricia Kaersenhout is a Surinamese artist based in Amsterdam. She recently participated in the Wakaman Project, which brought Surinamese artists working at home and abroad into a conversation about contemporary art. “As an artist I’m in a constant state of becoming,” she writes, “therefore my work can never be a finished product.... When a work is recognizable, sellable, suitable, please-able it contains too many ‘ables’. For me the only ‘able’ that coincides with my work is dis-able.”

Kaersenhout's most recent project is Invisible Men, a book of images and words inspired by Ralph Ellison's novel of (almost) the same name. Using the pages of an old biology textbook as her staring-point, she “tries to visualize the invisible; from spirit to flesh.”





From writer Eva van Leeuwen's text in Invisible Men:

You are standing really still behind the curtain. You hear people walking by, calling out, doors being opened and closed again. Being invisible seemed like the most wonderful thing imaginable.

Until that one particular day, when you hear nobody walking by and there is no calling out. You must have been standing really still behind the curtain for at least thirty minutes. It slowly dawns on you: there is nobody looking for me. And suddenly it was no longer any fun.

Perhaps you can only be invisible if you are being looked for. If you are not being sought then you simply don’t exist. And what if you are searching for an invisible someone but nobody is searching for you? Who is actually invisible then?





Invisible Men is published in a limited edition by Eindeloos. For more information, or to buy a copy, visit the publishers’ website. See more of the book here.