Job Koelewijn
Relief 1. 2011
Installation (wood, books and cassette tapes, 712 hours, registration: 1 Feb. 2006 - 24 Mar. 2009)
140 x 200 x 30 cm
Relief 2. 2012
Installation (wood, books and cassette tapes, 774 hours, registration: 25 Mar. 2009 - 6 Jan. 2012 ) 140x 200 x 30 cm
Job Koelewijn's work invites us to a more meditative sense of time. Since 2006 the artist starts every day by reading out loud crucial texts from the history of both eastern and western thinking for forty-five minutes. So not just Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, but also The I Ching – The Book of Changes, and he records this on audio-tape. The outcome –hundreds of tapes– is presented in Guangzhou in a bookshelf-like installation. The tapes can also be listened to in a special listening booth. According to the artist, the work makes clear that a mechanical act does not necessarily have to be benumbing, it can also lead –as many eastern techniques of thinking demonstrate– to different and more concentrated forms of insight, knowledge, and wisdom. (Henk Slager)
© Photo: Courtesy of 1st Asia Biennial &
5th Guangzhou Triennial,
Guangdong Museum of Art
11 December 2015 - 10 April 2016, Guangzhou, China. Theme: Asia Time. Organizer: Guangdong Museum of Art. Chairman: Luo Yiping. Chief Curators: Henk Slager, Zhang Qing. Curators: Kim Hong-Hee, Ute Meta Bauer, Sarah Wilson, Sun Ge.