Flying Dinner in Paris

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Flying Dinner (c) in Restaurant Zelda, Paris

RobertK presentation of Middle Eastern art at Flying Dinner, Paris. Photo Lea Santamaria

The Flying Dinner team (curator and contemporary art specialist Samantha Barroero and art & wine-expert Linda Grabe) invited me to give a presentation of contemporary Middle Eastern art in Paris, for a select group of collectors, curators and other specialists that were brought together for a lovely Moroccan lunch. The event took place on March 19 2011, after I returned from the Sharjah Biennial and Art Dubai. Continue reading →

My current exhibition in Amsterdam: The New Middle East

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Installation View of the New Middle East

The wave of popular uprisings throughout the Arab world have revealed a new Middle East – young, dynamic, secular, pragmatic and creative – which few people in the West knew about. It did not however come out of nowhere: as this exhibition shows, contemporary Middle Eastern culture has been developing very quickly over these last few years. Continue reading →

The fear of Big Brother

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The fear of Big Brother is justified as long as political power sits on top of us and has the means to lock us into a subordinate relationship of control. In the 1920s and 30s we saw how dictatorial regimes came into power in democracies through elections, so the sole fact that a political system is democratic is not sufficient to guarantee that civil liberties will be protected. In theory the Netherlands or any other democratic country could become a dictatorship after the next elections (and step out of the European Union and other binding international agreements if necessary). Continue reading →

My plans for establishing a contemporary art department at the ethnographic ‘Tropenmuseum’ in Amsterdam

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The Tropenmuseum was looking for a contemporary art curator, and I applied. They asked me what I would do were I to get my job. As with the vacancy of director for De Balie (see below, in Dutch) I got through to the last round but ultimately didn’t land the job (the main reason being that they thought I didn’t have a sufficiently solid theoretical basis in art history). However since I enjoyed writing these plans, and thinking about how a ‘stuffy’ old ethnographic museum that wants to renew its appeal could go about doing it, I’m sharing them with you here: Continue reading →

De echte integratie drama

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Wat mij betreft is het werkelijke drama van integratie van ‘allochtonen’ dat ze zo’n bleek beeld weerkaatsen van de Nederlandse cultuur. We zouden hen het hoogwaardigste van onze Nederlandse cultuur (humanisme, literatuur, intellectuele vrijheid) kunnen meegeven in plaats van de laagste gemene deler, zoals dat met de inburgering geschiedt. Bewaarden ze tot ze dat niveau bereikten maar meer van hun cultuur van oorsprong! Want zelfs de populaire, dorpse cultuur waaruit het meerendeel van hen afstamt (gekenmerkd door bijv gastvrijheid, eergevoel, onderlinge solidariteit) is een stuk beter dan het krasse materialisme en egoïsme van de Febo cultuur waarin ze belanden, door ons overtuigd dat dit het ware Nederland is!