Coalescence: Happenstance With All Due Intent curated by Paul O’Neill
with Ilke Gers, Moosje M Goosen, Anne Tallentire, and Grace Weir joining
Nina Canell, Jaime Gili, Liam Gillick, William McKeown, Isabel Nolan, Harold Offeh, Eduardo Padilha, Lawrence Weiner, and Walker & Walker.

Opening: Thursday 27 March, 12:00 – 18:00
On view during Art Rotterdam Week and South Explorer
on Friday 28, Saturday 29, and Sunday 30 from 12:00 – 18:00

Click here to see the current phase of the exhibition

Over the past year, we have invited Paul O’Neill to curate a new iteration of his Coalescence, a project that has been challenging the exhibition format since the early 2000s. In this second phase, we have expanded Shimmer’s space to provide more room for the exhibition, while subtle but significant changes have been made to the placement of existing works by Nina Canell, Jaime Gili, Liam Gillick, William McKeown, Isabel Nolan, Eduardo Padilha, Lawrence Weiner, and Walker & Walker.

With the addition of works by Ilke Gers, Moosje M Goosen, Anne Tallentire, and Grace Weir, the pairings and polarities within the exhibition become more pronounced. These new works and their placements bring forth fresh meanings, shoots that are growing, entwining and cross-pollinating as expressed through Weir’s contribution to the exhibition:

Within the groves of olive trees that grow along the shores of the Mediterranean, some trees have sprouted shoots for over two millennia, still growing since Plato’s circle paused within their shade. The leaves of the olive tree are arranged along the stem in pairs, each pair at right angles to the one above or below it. Generating from an infinitude somewhere within, while the outermost leaves gesture to the planar space of Euclid.

There are polarities which interplay and interweave, creating the diverse forms of life—flowers, leaf buds, and the human heart.
(In Parallel by Grace Weir, 2017)

Later in the exhibition, we will be joined by Noor Abed, Natalia Beylis, Kathrin Böhm, Ronan McCrea, Suzanne Mooney, Sarah Pierce, Harold Offeh, and many more friends.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS IN THE SECOND PHASE OF THE EXHIBITION

Ilke Gers is a visual artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Rotterdam. She creates site-specific installations and works with text, drawing, and publishing to explore the relationship between the body, movement, and language.

Her installations often take the form of ground works made through movement and open-ended processes that respond to spatial conditions, physical interaction, and time. By intervening in the normative mechanisms of communication and circulation, her work destabilises the assumed neutrality and fixed nature of the built environment, language forms, and behavioural codes.

Moosje M Goosen lives and works in Rotterdam. Writing and reading are her daily practices and she does them both with and without the idea of work on her mind. Stemming from her everyday experiences of chronic illness and its social environments, she is interested in language as a life form, a "spark of being" beyond the body in time and space. Her work mostly operates between disciplines: between literature and art; between different genres or registers of language; between theoretical, literary, and artistic research. In 2017 she was the recipient of a pair of donor lungs. 

Anne Tallentire is an artist from County Armagh, Northern Ireland, living and working in London, UK. Her practice encompasses moving image, sculpture, photography, installation, spatial drawing and related performance. Through a visual and textual interrogation of everyday materials and structures, Tallentire’s work seeks to reveal the systems that shape the built environment and the economics of labour.

Her recent work has explored geographical dislocation and demarcation in relation to infrastructure. Since 1993, Tallentire has also collaborated as part of the duo work-seth/tallentire with artist John Seth. She is the co-organiser, alongside Chris Fite-Wassilak, of the peripatetic event series hmn. Tallentire is represented by Hollybush Gardens, London. 

Grace Weir is an artist whose work spans film and video art, photography, painting, installation, web projects, and lecture-performances. A key aspect of her practice is a unique approach to research, driven by encounters with specific objects, books, artworks, locations, and conversations with philosophers, scientists, and practitioners from other disciplines.

Weir is particularly interested in unsettling trajectories in the formation of identity through our relationship with dominant systems of time and space, as well as through concepts of memory and record, reality and representation, and our perception of history and the future.