Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder

About

Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder takes place from January 19 to December 23, 2017 and follows the exhibition Sorry! NO We Don’t Do REQUESTS held at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, in the fall of 2016.

Typographer Will Holder (born 1969 in Hatfield, GB) produces oral and printed publications with artists and musicians. He is preoccupied with conversation as model and tool for a shared set of publishing conditions—whereby the roles of commissioner, author, subject, editor, printer, and typographer are improvised and shared, as opposed to assigned and predetermined.

When KW invited Holder to reside and produce a year’s public program, he proposed that the public nature of this program be deferred in the form of publications. Considering the conditions of private preparation and rehearsal necessary to make something public, Holder passed on his given time and production budget for invited guests to reside and work with him (Jeremiah Day, Linda van Deursen, Emmie McLuskey, Karolin Meunier, Christian Oldham, Bert Paulich, Falke Pisano, Cara Tolmie and Paul Abbott, Scott Rogers, and Lucy Skaer).

This invitation is based on two premises:

1

Driven by the demands of public display and perform­ ance, we are impelled to automate representations of work, live. Very little time is available to consider how the work might otherwise be re­presented, or reworked in a published situation; while the work exists for and is understood by a public, predominantly in a published form.

2

Artists are expected to produce immaculate work, often exhibited under immaculate conditions; while the artist’s personal conditions are often ill­considered.

Together with first guest, Bert Paulich, Holder has built and furnished a living space with suitable working conditions—including with his book collection (as public lending library for 2017). The focus is on the coming together of speaking­bodies­as­documents, and how these might be transcribed. During this time, work evolves, and is accessible through oral or printed productions of meaning. At KW, public events adapt to each guests’ practice, encompassing talks, presentations, or performances; while the predominantly public part of the work will be published and distributed through 2017 and beyond by uh books—an initiative of Will Holder with Emmie McLuskey.

Holder is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts published by De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, (2007 to 2016; and as of 2017 copublished by uh books and KW).

Opening hours library:

The library can be visited upon request. Please send a text message to the following number: +49 176 87425067.