Participatory arts projects

• Li An Phoa and Maarten van der Schaaf, authors of the book Drinkable Rivers, are walking from the source of the Thames to the Thames estuary from 17 September to 17 October and they want to talk with people who live along the Thames about river health. More details here.
• Durham Castle will be lit up with lots of colourful projections in November and your drawing could be included! For the chance to have your piece selected, submit your artwork by 15 October 2023. ‘Colour the Castle’ is a project by an artist collective from the Netherlands called Mr. Beam.
• Performance artist Cherish Menzo is looking for Leeds-based participants to join the Distorted Rap Choir. Participants will record a rap anthem that will be used in Cherish's performance ‘Dark Matter’ on 14 October in the Main Theatre of the Leeds School of Arts.
• Also in Leeds is the participatory arts project Motus Mori by Katja Heitmann. Katja is looking to work with people whose mobility is impaired. She will "archive" their movements and this participatory work will lead to artistic presentations in Leeds Art Gallery in December. Yorkshire Dance is partnering with Katja Heitmann to connect the artist with people with physical disabilities.

Two festivals in Leeds in October

It’s no coincidence that two of the aforementioned projects are taking place in Leeds. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK is partnering with cultural organisations in Leeds this year as the city is “letting culture loose” during the Year of Culture 2023. Many Dutch artists have benefitted from that collaboration. The month of October is another good moment to visit the city in Yorkshire and experience Dutch arts and culture.

• On 12 and 13 October there is Night Light Leeds, which includes artworks by Studio Toer and Jonas Vorwerk from the Netherlands.
• Transform Festival also takes place in October. Two Dutch performances are included in the programme: ‘Dark Matter’ by Cherish Menzo on Saturday 14 October and ‘Songs For No One’ by Nastaran Razawi Khorasani on Saturday 21 October.
• Also still on in Leeds is the solo exhibition ‘splashdown tender’ by Afra Eisma in The Tetley.
• Various other artists will be in Leeds in October for research work and residencies.
• Because there will be many Dutch artists in Leeds on 12 October, the Dutch Embassy is organising a gathering that day at The Tetley about Anglo-Dutch connections in contemporary culture. Interested in joining us? Please send an email to LON-PPC@minbuza.nl.

Film festivals large and small

• The Leeds International Film Festival in November will have a focus on the Netherlands this year. The festival’s programme hasn’t been announced yet. What we can already reveal is that there will be both new films from the Netherlands as well as some classics.
• The BFI London Film Festival is not just bringing films from the Netherlands to London, but also – just like last year – two Expanded Reality artworks.
  For her new film ‘Silver Haze’, Dutch film director Sacha Polak worked with British actress Vicky Knight again. The two worked together in the past on the very impressive film ‘Dirty God’. This is bound to be good. You can watch ‘Silver Haze’ in Vue West End or at ICA.
  Another recommendation is ‘Occupied City’ by the famous British filmmaker Steve McQueen, who lives in Amsterdam and London. ‘Occupied City’ observes 130 locations in present-day Amsterdam that relate directly to the Jewish community before and during the Nazi occupation of the city. These present-day images are combined with a voiceover that narrates what took place at each site in 1940-1945.
  Two Expanded Reality works by Dutch artists are part of the BFI’s exhibition at the Oxo Tower: ‘The Imaginary Friend’ by Steye Hallema and ‘Flow’ by Adriaan Lokman. LFF Expanded is on from 6 to 22 October.
• Another, much smaller, film festival is taking place at the CCA in Glasgow. It’s the Food Art Film Festival ‘Taking Root’ on 7 October. This festival is a spin off from an annual festival in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Various Dutch artists who are connected with the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and who have curated this festival will be in Glasgow for the screenings.

Dutch musicians touring the UK

If you can’t come to the Netherlands for live performances of the Sam Newbould Quintet or Someone, then these fantastic musicians will come to you! Both have organised very impressive UK tours.

• The Sam Newbould Quintet (jazz) is performing in Manchester on 18 September, Birmingham on 19 September, Leeds on 20 September, Hull on 21 September, Luton on 22 September, London on 23 September and Nottingham on 24 September.
• Someone (Tessa Rose Jackson and her band) are touring Belfast on 13 October, Glasgow on 14 October, Hull on 15 October, Leeds on 17 October, Manchester on 18 October, Huddersfield on 19 October, Liverpool on 20 October, Cambridge on 27 October, Bristol on 29 October, Brighton on 2 November and London on 3 November.

Literature

• Dutch author Daan Heerma van Voss takes the stage at Cheltenham Literature Festival on 9 October to speak about his book 'The Anxiety Project'. A day later, on 10 October, Gerda Blees speaks in Cheltenham about her book 'We Are Light'.
• At Sheffield’s annual literature festival Off The Shelf there will be an event reflecting on the colonial history of the Netherlands, and how that history continues to have an effect in society today. The book 'We Slaves of Suriname' by the late Anton de Kom will be discussed by a panel of Dutch and British creatives with multicultural backgrounds. Dutch participants are Tessa Leuwsha and Mitchell Esajas.

Slavery Memorial Year

The Dutch Embassy in the UK is also working with the University of Sheffield to have an exhibition about slavery installed at the university in October, during Black History Month. The exhibition is a poster presentation of an 2021 exhibition by the Rijksmuseum about slavery in Dutch colonies. Events to commemorate this dark past are taking place throughout the Slavery Memorial Year in the Netherlands, which runs until June 2024.

Visual arts

• The time that colonizers from the Netherlands went about their exploitative business was also a time when art from the Netherlands became highly acclaimed internationally. This autumn there are two exhibitions in London about eminent 17th century Dutch artists. Firstly, a major retrospective exhibition of Frans Hals opens at the National Gallery on 30 September. Secondly, The Queen’s House in Greenwich, once the studio where Willem van de Velde The Elder and The Younger drew and painted naval battles between the Netherlands and England, commissioned by the King of England, is now – 350 years on – again entirely decicated to the Van de Veldes.
• Contemporary artists from the Netherlands are popular in the UK too.
  This October, a solo exhibition of Mounira Al Solh will open at The National Museum Cardiff. This is part of the biennial art festival Artes Mundi.
  The Sainsbury Centre in Norwich is currently working with Netherlands-based artist Claudia Martínez Garay. Following her research, studying colonial era artefacts that can be found in museums in the UK, Claudia Martínez Garay will make new works in response to those artefacts and the fact that they are kept in British museums. Her new works will be displayed at the Sainsbury Centre in 2024.

Bridging the North Sea with help from the Embassy

Many of the projects mentioned in this article are supported by the Dutch Embassy in London. The aim of the cultural department at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is to connect people working at arts organisations in the UK with artists in the Netherlands and support them to work together. This way, audiences in the UK get an opportunity to experience arts from the Netherlands and artists from the Netherlands get an opportunity to work internationally. If you want to know more, contact us on lon-ppc@minbuza.nl.