Perforated Perspective

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
until 29 may 2011

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museumpark 18-20
3015 CX Rotterdam
Postbus 2277
3000 CG Rotterdam
010 44 19 561

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is staging photographer Hans Wilschut’s exhibition Perforated Perspective, a large-scale photographic work on Nanjing, China, as well as two monumental works from Johannesburg. Wilschut’s lifelike images look beyond the boundaries of Urban Reality.

During recent trips to China and South Africa, Dutch photographer Hans Wilschut (Ridderkerk, 1966) took photographs of urban locations. He shot ‘Perforated Perspective’ in Nanjing, and ‘Touch’ and ‘Relocation’ in Johannesburg. In Rotterdam, Wilschut’s pictures play with the architecture of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s stairwell.

Horizon

‘Perforated Perspective’ is constructed from two photographs taken with a telephoto lens. When the two shots were combined into a single image, the result proved to have exactly the same proportions as the stairwell wall. The photograph affects the space of the museum so that it seems that the wall has been broken through. The buildings in the photograph appear to be sited behind the museum space, as if outside, so that the viewer is drawn towards the horizon.


touch, 2010, Johannesburg

Human side

‘Touch’ tries to look beyond the austere, formal exterior of a bank in Sandton, a suburb of Johannesburg. The traces of the people who damaged the Venetian blinds to look out, lay bare the hidden social aspect of the building. Wilschut gets to the heart of the vulnerable human side of the remote metropolis of today.


relocation, 2010, Johannesburg

Informal change

‘Relocation’ is a photograph of an apartment block on the edge of downtown Johannesburg. Built in the 1970s to house predominantly white occupants, the building fell empty and was then illegally occupied by people from a township when apartheid came to an end. At dusk this informal change is manifest in the colourful curtains and the knick-knacks in the windows. ‘Relocation’ is a metaphor for the integration of the first and the third world. The end of apartheid in South Africa is slowly but surely driving this sociological

Process

Hans Wilschut also had an exhibition in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 2005. His works have recently been shown in Shanghai, Johannesburg and Rotterdam. A monograph on his work, ‘Still Motion. Lyric Reflections on Urbanism’ by d’Jonge Hond, is being published to coincide with ‘Perforated Perspective’.
Several times a year Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen showcases new works of art that involve a particular location in the museum. ‘Perforated Perspective’ is number 14 in this series of ‘Interventions’.


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