En Rachâchant
Ola Vasiljeva
Solo exhibition
13 September – 13 December 2015
Vleeshal (Map)
Curator: Roos Gortzak
En Rachâchant was Ola Vasiljeva's first institutional solo show in the Netherlands. The exhibition borrowed its title from a short film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet based on the children’s story Ah! Ernesto by Marguerite Duras. It took a humorous look at de-hierarchising the educational process through the character of Ernesto, who insistently refuses to go to school because it teaches things he doesn’t know.
In En Rachâchant, Vasiljeva strategically approached negation and the refusal to learn. In a time when the market logic dominates all fields of teaching and dictates that knowledge must be rentable in economic terms, this show mounted a playful assault on this ideology. The exhibition took on the form of an anti-pedagogical stage, populated by mixed media works, sculptures and drawings that manipulated motifs related to the subject of disobedience as a course of learning.
As part of the exhibition, Vasiljeva developed two course programmes: The Course in Lying and The Course in Doubt, which were incorporated within Vleeshal’s education programme during the exhibition. The show ran parallel to and in dialogue with the group exhibition University at Vleeshal Zusterstraat.
The entire installation of this exhibition was newly commissioned for the Vleeshal. Two individual works were added to the Vleeshal collection.
Works in the Vleeshal collection
Publication and edition
Persons
This project was made possible by the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund and the municipality of Middelburg.