PLAY HARD
Come and play along when the Dutch artist Frank Koolen (b. 1978, Maastricht) takes over the museum with various playful installations, indoor and outdoor. In the exhibition PLAY HARD, playing is the starting point for a series of meetings, relations and situations in which your participation often is the center of the artworks. It isn’t necessarily a kind of playing that you recognize or remember from your childhood. Some of the games are fun and humoristic, others absurd and difficult to decipher or bound to fail from the beginning. You might feel both challenged and a bit under surveillance – because your participation has an essential influence on whether the game functions or not.
The playful, experimental, open and uncontrollable have always been important parts of Koolens artistic universe. Koolen is fascinated particularly by the many paradoxical, silly and also serious social and cultural relations that humans form themselves and with other (animals) through play in everyday life. Through various media; installation, performance, collage and video, the exhibition PLAY HARD studies the communities and possibilities that arise through the combination of play and art.
Opening: Friday September 18th 5-7pm
Go behind the scenes of the exhibition in this VIDEO. Press coverage: REVIEW: Play Hard acclaimed by Danish art critic.
Urban Game
An urban game will be developed for Roskilde based on the exhibition in a collaboration between Frank Koolen, the game festival w00t and the culture production collective Indgreb. Parts of the city will be involved as a game board.
Catalogue
We have published a lavishly illustrated interdisciplinary catalogue with different researchers’ approaches to play, artist contributions, tiny games (e.g. "The Singing Review"), and other playful ideas. Read more about the catalogue: NEW Catalogue: Frank Koolen - PLAY HARD.
The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Nordea-fonden, Roskilde Kommunes Kom ud og leg-pulje as well as Kulturpuljen, and the Mondriaan Fund.
