Strangers and Paradise

Strangers & Paradise offers an overview of works by Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé and features new works by Nasrin Tabatabai and Gediminas Urbonas.

The exhibition of the works by Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé (Nigeria -UK) presents for the first time a large selection of his photo- and videoworks. The exhibition focuses on Bamgboyé’s exploration of the relation between identity and modern technology, and especially the perception of the black body. With ambivalent erotic poses, Bamgboyé examines ‘blackness’ in the public imagination, in mythology and mass-culture. His body fulfils the double function as object of sexual desire and perversity and as commentary to the commodification of blackness. These themes will also be the subject of a monograph about Bamgboyé’s work that accompanies the exhibition.

In her work The Weaver-bird (2000) Nasrin Tabatabai (Iran – the Netherlands) employs the fragile imagery of the lace collection in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen to explore the phenomenon of data transformation. Symbol for a delicate, veiled world, the lace serves as a basis for digital patterns that the visitor can open, edit and print in an installation masked as a place of production.

Transaction (2000) by Gediminas Urbonas (Lithuania) addresses the changing Lithuanian political regime’s psychological effects on different generations of Lithuanians. Urbonas transforms Witte de With’s exhibition spaces into an archive containing fictional and autobiographic images and sounds.

The work will be made in collaboration with Nomeda Urboniene (camera/editing), Marta Vosyliute (stage design), Darius Ciuta (architecture/sound), Ruta Baciulyte and Raimundas Milasiunas (psychiatrists).