PAN Amsterdam 2024

Carmen Schabracq

Carmen Schabracq (Amsterdam, NL, 1988) creates paintings, sculptural installations, masks and performances in which the theatricality of life plays an important role. She gathers stories from various myths, traditions and her own experiences and uses them to create collage-like visual narratives. The mask is a recurring object and theme in her work, which she uses to explore the complexity of human identity. A mask is a tool within a ritual or performance, to become 'the other' and she plays with this in various ways. Her work is also a form of escapism because of the characters she places in spaces of colour. A way to briefly escape from this world and imagine yourself in another, full of playfulness and humour, to deal with the layered reality of life and death. Just as folkloric rituals and traditions do, for instance in the celebration of the seasons, to propitiate the gods, scare off demons and devils or celebrate fertility. Schabracq's work is a stylised theatre of her own cosmos, with references from art history and folklore such as costumes. Carmen was born in Amsterdam (1988), where she now lives and works. In 2012 she obtained her BA in fine arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, after a year of painting studies at the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome. In 2015 she obtained her MA in theater costume design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, with a research and body of work she called 'naked masks'. In 2017-2018 she received the ‘new makers subsidy’ from the Performing Arts Fund NL, with which she made two in situ performances in Zeeland. Her work has been shown in several museums, like Stedelijk Museum Breda, Museum Tot Zover, Amsterdam and Nest, The Hague.

Dodi Espinosa

Dodi Espinosa (MX, 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist originating from the vibrant heart of Mexico City, where the colourful tapestry of archeology, shamanism and syncretism shaped his worldview and artistic sensibility. Now a Belgian citizen he calls Antwerp his home. His creations encompass performance, installation, objects, painting, workshops, among others. Each infused with inspirations from archaeology, sacral art, pop and indigenous cultures, and his characteristic tongue in cheek. His works have earned places in institutional and museum collections in both Belgium and the Netherlands. This acknowledgment not only underscores his reputation but also amplifies the cross-cultural dialogues he aims to cultivate. The artworks of Espinosa are more than just visual expressions; they are profound messages and calls to societal awakening. He reflects on a myriad of societal challenges, from mental health and identity to race and sexuality. His art acts as a bridge, linking the past with the present, the deeply personal with the universal. As a queer voice with a postcolonial lens, he offers a unique and confessional perspective, pushing boundaries and prompting deeper introspection on issues that touch us all. While his initial work gravitated towards object-based art, his recent endeavours over the last years reflect a conceptual shift towards social experimentation, installation, performance and a more collective paradigm. Dodi Espinosa had a solo exhibition at Beautiful Distress, Amsterdam (2022). He also took part in group exhibitions in M HKA (in collaboration with. NICC), Antwerp (2019), the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL, 2020), W139, Amsterdam (2020) and Mu.Zee, Ostend (2019 and 2022). His work is incorporated in the collections of Fries Museum, Mu.Zee, Museum van de Geest and the AkzoNobel art collection.

Koos Buster

Saar Scheerlings

Born in Eindhoven in 1990, Saar Scheerlings embarked on her artistic journey after studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven and gaining experience as a chef and theater designer. Scheerlings mixes the disciplines of art, design and craft to find processes that give rise to new types and expressions. Her work includes large ceramic vessels that serve as painted maps, decanters that seem unwilling to pour, paintings that resemble fabrics and soft monumental sculptures. For her, a medium is not defined: she prefers to create her own playing field and associated rules. A great interest in daily life probably comes from her education in design, but she is not very interested in the way products are industrially designed, made and used. She prefers to see forms as intermediate phases of a creative process, a game, a tradition, a ritual, a culinary dish. It is the commitment to this process that gives objects meaning. Saars work is often triggered by the beauty and dedication of old materials like the antique linens she finds at garage sales in the French countryside where she lives. With a laborious process of sculpting, cutting, sewing and weaving she breathes new life into these materials, transforming them into her monumental talisman sculptures. Weaving is not only a technique for Saar, it is a metaphor for her entire work. She sees her oeuvre as an expanding structure. She not only creates work, she works on her own culture. The work of Saar Scheerlings has been shown in various international galleries and museums including CoBrA Museum, Design Museum Gent, Hanwha Galleria Seoul, Tripostal Lille, Galerie Fleur & Wouter, Valerius Gallery, HAGD Contemporary, De Nederlandsche Bank, Garage Rotterdam and at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as a finalist for the prestigious Loewe Foundation Craft Prize.

Tom Volkaert

Tom Volkaert’s sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging. But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive. Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues. Text : Bram Leven

Warre Mulder