In the depths of memory
Exhibition videos
Labyrinth of memories. In six galleries with a total of 1000m2, visitors where able to stroll through Van Veluw's astonishing oeuvre – a journey capped off by his newest installation, an ‘obsessive’ and room-filling finale.
Levi van Veluw’s installations are fully-staged ‘worlds’ that the viewer can enter. His work reflects tremendous power of imagination and is often made entirely by hand.
In Labyrinth of memories, Levi van Veluw presents a range of two and three-dimensional works, including five large installations. For this exhibition, and based on his intuition, Van Veluw has selected a number of highlights from the existing collection. By doing so, he has placed items from the museum’s collection in a new light and incorporated them into his own narrative.
The final work is a room-filling installation of 156m2 which took Van Veluw an entire year to complete. For this artwork, the largest gallery has been converted into a spiral-shaped space containing a dizzying number of shelves. These neat rows of blocks gradually give way to a heaped and chaotic mass of 1,500 sculpted heads – each one apparently made and then rejected in the artist’s unceasing quest to reproduce his own likeness. The visitor literally finds themselves caught up in Van Veluw’s obsessive urge to create.
Beyond Matter: The floor, walls and ceiling of the installation are made of glass. Behind it, the entire setting is composed of an organic relief that is interspersed with what appear to be sacral patterns and shapes, exhibited as if they were the remains of a mysterious cult. With its industrial steel-and-glass structure, the installation also explicitly refers to modernist architecture. The clean and minimalist formal approach of the cube contrasts starkly with the handcrafted, richly ornamented and seemingly timeworn character of the sacral-looking artifacts displayed behind and underneath the glass.
In contrast with these very divergent visual languages, Van Veluw shows how modern-day Western society views physical remnants of distant times and places. Exhibiting items behind glass creates a physical as well as conceptual distance. Any object taken out of the real world and conserved within a glass display immediately becomes precious, and acquires an air of truth and institutional importance.