Strange and Close (Play Van Abbe)

In Strange and Close, Esche presents a view on the history of the period after 1989, the year of the collaps of the Berlin Wall, the protests on the Tiananmen Square in China and the end of Apartheid in South-Africa. The exhibition, in which many new purchases are on view in the museum for the first time, invites the visitor to discover new relations between art and its various contexts within the museum.

Strange and Close is a counterpart to Repetition: Summer Display 1983, thus showing how much broader the geographical area that modern art covers has become. Moreover, Strange and Close signals a shift in collecting: from the autonomous art work towards an entangled variety of objects, archives, (documentary) sources and stories. The exhibition features works by Hüseyin Alptekin, Yael Bartana, Harun Farocki, Dan Flavin, Gülsün Karamustafa, Dan Peterman and Nedko Solakov.