The installation ''Destroyed House" is the result of a challenging plan to create a semi-permanent architectural installation to be realized in one 'undeveloped', once bricked-up space, almost completely cut off from the outside world and without any daylight. In this building, Teeuwen goes on her usual deconstructive way. To finally come to a brutalist installation, in which two uneven squares are trying to get into a more perfect position. Like a phoenix, which attempts to take a geometric form, but only partially and even for a brief moment, succeeds. An abstract minimalist rhythm, in which the feeling of order, regularity and beauty, as well as insecurity, disruption and destruction is sensible (war is not far away).

Destroyed House x Brutus is an initiative of Marjan Teeuwen and Lobke Broos/ROOF-A with a generous contribution from the Mondriaan Fund.

The first solo exhibition by Felix Burger in the Netherlands shows expansive installations from the last 10 years and new works that have been specially developed for the exhibition venue.

See also our side program.

Burger's visual language is not limited to one genre. A work rarely consists of a single piece, but rather of walk-in stages with narrative choreographies. In his 2021 publication, he says in an interview about future artistic ideas: "I would like to create a series of spaces that are connected to each other. I would try to develop a dramaturgy that extends not just through a single work, not just through a single room, but through an entire building."
In Brutus, he now realises this overall spatial approach and transforms the existing industrial architecture into a large, accessible stage set. Individual works are distributed across the various rooms and floors and represent worlds of their own; chambers of wonders with autonomous laws. Together, they form a coherent order of light and darkness, loud and quiet, movement and standstill.

Central themes are questions of perception, social and private power structures and human role-playing. Burger, who can often be seen in front of the camera as the protagonist, creates absurd intermediate worlds with reminiscences of early film, fairground trash and opera swagger. Traditional role models, social norms and gender classifications are dissected and arranged into new forms. Not in a moralising way, but with a childishly naive view of the adult world.
Burger mentions the Bavarian humourist Karl Valentin, the early avant-garde work of Christoph Schlingensief and Herbert Achternbusch or the film essays of Alexander Kluge as sources of inspiration. Artists who worked with humour as an instrument of resistance and created absurd narratives.
Comedy and despair are also closely intertwined in Burger's work: The universe created in Brutus bristles with subversive poetry, beautiful nightmares, meticulous dilettantism and disastrous misunderstandings.

In addition to his monographic work, the artist is also integrating collaborative projects with friends and colleagues from recent years into the exhibition: Together with Lion Bischof and Otakar Skala, he is showing the performance project "Circus Burger & Skala" (2024) for the first time as an elaborate video installation, with Sophia Süßmilch an excerpt from the joint cycle of "Der Kleine Mann" (2020-2022) and with Böhler & Orendt the ghost conjuring mirror "A Mess Carol" (2020).

Felix Burger, born in Munich in 1982, studied visual arts in Munich, Vienna and Cologne. He was a scholar at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2022, he held a guest professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His installations and films have been exhibited in numerous international institutions.

With collaborations by Lion Bischof, Böhler & Orendt, Otakar Skala and Sophia Süßmilch
Photo credit: Circus Skala & Burger @Bischof/Burger/Skala

Devo(lu)tion is a duo show by Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh and Dutch glass artist Emmy van de Grift. It is a dramatic interplay between the eastern gods infected by capitalism encapsulated in Kueh’s intricate tapestries and the western deities being digested by fungi in can de Grift’s delicate glassworks. The tension between the two worlds questions the politics of the ever-shifting ideologies of our devotions and the duality of it all – from the nuanced connotations and the intricate power plays.

“Our blight is ideologies – they are the long-expected antichrist” – Carl Jung

See also our side program.

What is it about the sound of waterfalls that paints the imagination of the overworked hustler who grew up in the city? What is it about the idea of living in a penthouse that strikes a chord of the heartstrings of the jungle dwellers living below the poverty line?

Once I was told to look deeply into the mycelium of a mushroom and meditate on it. For a split second, I could see the universe – I saw how we are all interconnected as one, how we all go through cycles of life and death, how naturally our bodies and lives destruct and rejuvenate as an integral part of growth. The next second, I saw my personal yacht floating in Santorini when I manage to save the world and earn big bucks by campaigning my new age religion and market my mycelium might pills.

Sometimes it is scary what I am willing to do to shed this skin of poverty and shame, to devolve into a disgusting city dweller in exchange for their ascension to a higher state of conscious; maybe I will always be the scavenger, preying on the surrendered possession on the predators just to feel what it is like to be in their skin.

We can exchange our devotions, you can go back to being the enlightened one, and I can return to be the other one.

Text by Marcos Kueh

(L) Under God’s Eye, 2023 by Marcos Kueh (Courtesy of Galerie Ron Mandos) - (R) Schemer, 2023 by Emmy van de Grift