Page Not Found hosted series of Sunday workshops for children, which were choreographed by The Oceans Academy of Arts. The Oceans Academy Of Arts (OAOA), founded by Ola Vasiljeva, is an anonymous and hybrid art collective, which functions as a platform for ideas about art, culture and their representation thereof. As part of OAOA, Vasiljeva has been annually publishing zines and other printed matter since 2008. This way publishing became an important part of her creative practice. OAOA’s printed matter varies between zines, small silkscreen editions, newspapers, letters, posters and other ephemera.

Children, aged 4-8, were invited to join and participate in making books, prints and imaginary barricades. The workshops questioned what one might call a book or a publication, whether it could be a letter or a napkin or a collection of notes. The participants experimented with silkscreen, risograph and carbon paper prints.

Page Not Found was delighted to host a talk by Evita Vasiljeva about her publication “If You Can’t, Engage”. She introduced the way how she worked on this book as a sculpture, together with designer Mislav Žugaj. For this project, she says, “Photoshop was my studio, toolbox and exhibition space”. This talk will also delve into the physicality of the book-medium. Evita explored the tension between producing a defined, serialised object, as mandated by book publishing, and creating uncertain, dismantled forms, to which her practice tends to.

Evita Vasiljeva (1985, Riga, LV) lives and works in Amsterdam and Riga. In 2013 she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and, from 2014 to 2016, she was artist-in-residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Recent solo shows include “Manhours in Headquarters”, P/////AKT, Amsterdam (NL); “Gut House on The Print Level”, kim?, Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (LV); Nothing Lost, Nothing Found, gallery 427, Riga (LV); and “Potlatch”, De Ateliers end show, Amsterdam (NL).

Mislav Žugaj is a designer, teacher and medical student. He often  works with Gaile Pranckunaite as Sprawl, which investigates climate change, and the use of design as ethnographic tool.

Page Not Found was delighted to invite our audiences to a talk by Bernice Nauta in collaboration with Alexandra Martens Serrano, with a guest performance by Jip Piet Hilhorst. 

Bernice Nauta recently returned from a working period in Mexico City where she created a radio show and published a zine in collaboration with Alexandra Martens Serrano. The show is narrated by two characters known only as ‘A’ and ‘B’. They will place a third element ‘Mister C’ under examination. The radio show and the performance were accompanied by the sculptures of these characters, which occupied the floor of Page Not Found.

For  the occasion of Hoogtij#52, Page Not Found invited artists Ceel Mogami de Haas and Arvo Leo for a one-night intervention of their choosing in our space. They proposed a video screening and a performance inspired by their respective publications.

The artists showed two computer-generated animations, “Subliminal Seduction” and “Glas”, installed in the passage of Boekhorststraat 25.

This time Page Not Found invited the audience for a dialogue with Mahmoud Bakhshi. Born in 1977 in Tehran (Iran), Mahmoud Bakhshi lives and works between his hometown and Amsterdam. In 2001, he graduated with a BA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran. In 2014, he attended the Rijksakademie’s artist residency. In addition to his participation in local and international exhibitions, Bakhshi founded Bon-Gah, a non-profit initiative located in Karasht (Iran), which works as a publishing house and provides an alternative space for artists to further pursue their studio-practice.

Bakhshi’s installations and sculptural works analyze the aesthetics of post-revolutionary Iran, composed of a distinctive combination of ideological Islam, industrial capitalism and the liberational iconography of the 1979 Revolution and the Islamic Iran. His work represents a struggle between an art that is self-conscious of its independence and the propaganda of the state.

The dialogue in Page Not Found focused on the project “Night, Blackness and Other Stories…”, and the book that accompanies this work. Reflecting on the effect of censorship on literature and art, this conversation discussed whether it is possible to foresee the future of one’s artwork and the impact it has on the society. The talk was followed by an introduction to the initiative Bon-Gah

Page Not Found was happy to invite Bertus Gerssen to talk about his photobook “In Situ”. The publication is the result of a three-year photographic journey into the underground music scene of Den Haag. “In Situ” seizes that scene and its actors, met at techno parties, punk gigs and experimental concerts in squats, basement bars and subsidized music studios, into a powerful portrait of what lays in the shadow of mainstream, beautifully rendered by its risograph printing.

To start our programme of public events, Page Not Found was delighted to invite Margaret Haines to talk about her practice and research. In particular, she read excerpts from an upcoming book exploring her role as a board member of the Cameron Parsons Foundation since 2014, a recent curatorial junket at agnès b. presenting ephemera from the foundation archive, and her 2012 publication “Love With Stranger x Coco”.

The book Coco x Love With Stranger explores different tropes of female identity – mixing personas, identities, some parafictional, some actual. Based on the narrative structure of Don Quixote, the book revolves around three female protagonists—Coco, a character that appears in Haines’ forthcoming film; Los Angeles artist and cult figure, Cameron (1922-1995), famed for her role in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; and Haines’s own ruminations.

The book presents a visual mash up of Coco’s inner compulsions and obsessions through film stills, collages of props, and photographs of the actresses who interpret on her scripts. Throughout making the film, Haines held varying degrees of closeness with the actresses, including acting as an on-call babysitter for the youngest ‘Coco.’ These relationships are presented in the book and insert the artist as a quasi-actress, collaborator and character.

Haines’s identity of raconteur/protagonist develops further with a diary-style essay about Cameron titled “Love with Stranger.” This essay presents an alternative to the hysteric girl-culture of Coco by introducing Cameron— a figure fully cognizant and in control of her own female identity, and whose own practice explored techniques of imitation and subversion. Following a trail of archival research on the life of Cameron, the artist eventually meets Beat poet Aya Tarlow, once Cameron’s confidante. This encounter leads to the re-discovery of a text Aya gave Cameron in the 1950s, and which Cameron later read on the radio in the 1970s, in an attempt to “free women.”

Coco x Love With Stranger is a 144 page soft-cover perfect-bound book published by New Byzantium in an edition of 500. Printed on newsprint in color and black and white, its format references 1990s tweenage pulp novels. The film and its soundtrack (composed by artist Patrick Dyer) was released in Spring 2013, on a usb silicone necklace made in collaboration with designer Arielle de Pinto.

Margaret Haines (b. 1984, Montreal, Canada) studied at École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and Concordia University in Montreal, and received her MFA at CalArts. In 2015-2016 she has been a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited at ltd los angeles, Carroll Fletcher Gallery and ICA in London, Western Front Exhibitions in Vancouver, and Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, amongst others.

Page Not Found and The Reading Room are delighted to invite you to participate in our new program. The Reading Room is a series of reading sessions revolving around short texts provided by invited guests — contemporary researchers, cultural theorists, philosophers and artists — who join us to provide insight and context to the topics at hand. The Reading Room is curated by Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik.

For this 36th session, Rebekka Kiesewetter joins The Reading Room in an effort to navigate Hamid Dabashi’s text “Can Europeans Read?” (2015). We will understand reading as an interventionist, performative and collaborative way of engaging with a text. We will look at the questions Dabashi raises, consider his ideas around the urgency of thinking “beyond postcoloniality”, and his claim that Europeans will indeed be unable to read anything besides themselves until they “join the rest of humanity in their common quest for a level remapping of the world”. The ability to read will become a form of political engagement.

Taking Dabashi’s text as a point of departure we will enact Johanna Drucker’s concept of “performative materiality” that considers reading as a “constitutive act (…) that makes the text”. Through our engagement – that takes the form of a workshop – the text will lose its status as a fixed, static and authoritative entity, and become open(-ended), inherently relational, multi-temporal, and generative. Along with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney we treat text as a social space: “To say that [text is] a social space is to say that stuff is going on: people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing of one another, brushing against one another – and you enter into that social space, to try to be part of it”.

Rebekka Kiesewetter studied art history, economics and modern history at the University of Zurich). She worked as a writer, editor and curator. She has been a Visiting Professor and Guest Lecturer at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, the University of the Arts Bern, and the Political Arts Experimentation Program (SPEAP) at Sciences Po (FR), among other institutions. Also, she is a founding member of DA Institut, a member and former co-director of Depot Basel. Currently she is a writing and thesis tutor at the Sandberg Academy Amsterdam and is doing her PhD at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Her work evolves on the intersections of experimental publishing, art, design, and the humanities. Her research interests are radical Open Access publishing, experimental publishing, the material, relational and performative dimension of publishing and publications, the philosophical and political dimensions of openness and accessibility, and feminist and intersectional critiques of knowledge production.

Note from the curators

Seating for this event is limited. Please reserve a spot by booking a free ticket below. We will provide you with a copy of the texts once your ticket is booked. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the provided texts before attending. Due to the current pandemic situation, we ask you to bring your own snacks and observe physical distance. We will provide masks. After the event, you are welcome to stay around for an informal chat/drink with us.

Starts at 19:00. Get your free ticket.

We’re excited to invite you to Koen Taselaar’s first solo show in The Hague. “Opinionated Aquarium” illustrates the diversity and width of Taselaar’s practice, which playfully embraces tapestry, sculpture, illustration and printed matter.

Page Not Found got first acquainted with Taselaar’s work through his publications “Dyslectic Melody” and “Myslectic Delody”. These risograph-printed editions combine fluorescent colors and kaleidoscopic arrangements of Taselaar’s drawings. These publications emerged during Taselaar’s stay in Seoul and were inspired by the artist’s inability to read and process the Hangul script. The artist translated these illegible characters into delightfully absurd scenes in the chaos of detailed line-work and abstract elements.

His publishing work equally functions as a co-actor and continuation to his ceramics, drawing or other visual output. His ideas seem to flow effortlessly into various forms and materials. Sometimes, they are literally woven into complex compositions, as in the case of his recent immersion into tapestry making. Page Not Found is delighted to invite you to discover Koen Taselaar’s playful visual cosmos.

Koen Taselaar (Rotterdam, 1986) graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy. His work has been recently exhibited in Centraal Museum Utrecht, and Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He has been nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs (2015) as well as the NN-Award (2020). He is currently working on a commission for the Hermitage (Saint Petersburg, Russia).

The exhibition opens on Friday 11 at 18:00 and will close on Sunday 27 at 18:00. To make sure our visitors stay safe, booking a ticket is required to visit this exhibition. Tickets are for free. To get yours, please follow the link below, and select a date and a time slot. Thank you!

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Starts every hour.

We kindly thank Stroom Den Haag and Mondriaan Fonds for supporting this exhibition.

At the occasion of The Hague Contemporary Art Weekend, Koen Taselaar gives a talk introducing his practice and presents his latest publication, made in collaboration with students of the University of the Arts, Utrecht.

Koen Taselaar (Rotterdam, 1986) graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy. His work has been recently exhibited in Centraal Museum Utrecht, and Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He has been nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs (2015) as well as the NN-Award (2020). His solo show at Page Not Found runs until September 27. He is currently working on a commission for the Hermitage (Saint Petersburg, Russia).

Due to the current distancing measures, attendance is limited. Visitors are required to book a ticket.

Get your free ticket

Starts at 19:00.