GlueHeads (rejects)

Isabel Reitemeyer… Caro Mantke… and many internationally renowned collagists more. A field day for the connoisseur.

Everyone reading this should not waste time, but take the car, a taxi or the first train to Verbeke Foundation, the art site at Kemzeke near Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. It’s there that HOK’s Lula Valletta has curated the great collagists’ exhibition GlueHeads A Berlin odyssey into the unreal, on view this whole summer until 4 November. And now in HOK, starting Friday 21 July, we have the rejects from this Glueheads exposition, the works that did not finally make it into Verbeke, the never-before exhibited, the rarities, the not-to-be-accepted, in short: the collector’s items.

To make this exposition possible, HOK’s artist in permanent residence Lula Valletta has dug up her own roots from a seven years’ stay in Berlin, home of the homeless and cradle of the disruptive, if not to say destructive art called collage. And where Lula’s roots are, there are HOK’s roots as well.

 

GlueHeads (2014-2019) was a contemporary collage project bringing together a group of collage loving artists, lots of magazines, scissors and glue and a hint of good spirit. Berlin is the city where Anelor Robin started GlueHeads as a project in 2014. Little did she know that GlueHeads by 2023 would have grown beyond the project and become a group of friends, a Berliner collage collective, of which she was and will always remain the glue. Even though the project GlueHeads died along with Anelor’s untimely death four years ago, the GlueHeads are still very much active as a collective. A GlueHead you are for life… The basic tenets of the GlueHeads project were as simple as they were powerful: One Day, One Exhibition, One Zine. For each edition of the GlueHeads project, curator Anelor Robin brought together artists working with different collage techniques. To make every exhibition and accompanying zine unique, each session was always held in a different gallery with a whole new set of artists. In the gallery during the daytime, the artists created the collages that were shown to the audience at the end of the day and that eventually ended up in the next edition of the GlueHeads zine. All artists brought their own materials, although there was also an emphasis on sharing, collaboration, and creating a collective stew of raw and unexpected creative ingredients to draw from. Anelor organised GlueHeads editions 1-5 in Berlin, before travelling with the concept to Turkey, Morocco, Iran, and Serbia. The GlueHeads artists community (everyone who was ever included in or invited to join a GlueHeads session) spans 58 artists worldwide. The artists on view here at HOK are a section of longstanding Berliner GlueHeads. This exhibition celebrating the project GlueHeads and the contemporary collage scene in Berlin is lovingly dedicated to Anelor’s memory.

Participants: Anelor Robin †, Jorge Chamorro, Caro Mantke, Lula Valletta, Natascha Frioud D.M. Nagu, Lydia Mojzis, Niels Kalk, Isabel Reitemeyer, Aline Helmcke, and Rinus van Alebeek

 

Vernissage
Friday 21 July, 7 PM

Collage workshop by Lula Valletta
Sunday 13 August, 11-17h. Damage 40 Euro.
RSVP: info[at]lulavalletta[dot]com

Expo on view til Saturday 19 Augustus