Exhibition  'Detours'  by  Roy  Villevoye  in  Rotterdam

 

Time: 14 June 2008 - 10 August 2008

Place: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Museumpark 18-20, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Site: http://www.boijmans.nl/en/10/press/pressitem/40 (with photographs)

 

The director of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen invites you to the opening of the exhibition 'Detours' by Roy Villevoye on Saturday 14 June 2008, 14.00-17.00. The publication Detours will be presented by Tijs Goldschmidt at 14.30.

 

The exhibition 'Detours' starts where Roy Villevoye (1960, Maastricht) left off painting in the late 1980s. Dissatisfied with his role as an artist in the 'sanatorium' of Western art history, Villevoye decided to travel to the Asmat region of West Papua, a former Dutch colony. Through these experiences he was able to developan artistic practice that reconnected with 'real life'. In the following years this resulted in installations and a large number of films (many of them made in collaboration with Jan Dietvorst) and photographic works. 'Detours' brings these works together for the first time.

 

The exhibition 'Detours' includes several billboards, produced by advertising painters in Mumbai based upon photographs taken by Villevoye in India and Papua.

 

The encounter between two cultures and the manner in which various cultures appropriate each other's artefacts is dealt with in a razor-sharp way in the installation Red Calico. This shows T-shirts adapted by the Asmat people, which Villevoye has found, collected and combined with photographic portraits of their owners. Villevoye has made several new films and installation specially for the exhibition, that place his work within a new focus.

 

Simultaneously with the exhibition, an English-language monograph Detours is published with contributions by the anthropologist Amanda Ravetz, Sven Lütticken, the evolutionary biologist Tijs Goldschmidt and Lex ter Braak.