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In summer 2010, the Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout (b.1968) opened a temporary 'shop' in an abandoned unit in the Zuid plein mall in Rotterdam South, a working class district of Holland that is home to several large immigrant communities. Rather than simply selling goods, van Lieshout, who lived in Rotterdam South between 1993 and 2007, used his shop as a base from which to (re)connect with the neighbourhood and its people, engaging them in characteristically frank and often very funny conversations about roots, regeneration, consumerism, and the rise of the Dutch Right Wing. His new film installation Commission (2011), debuting at the Hayward Gallery Project Space, documents this experience.
Van Lieshout has said that Commission is 'my commentary on the socio-political powerlessness of people and of art. It is also my quest for a home.' Examining the impact of figures such as the Rotterdam-based 'starchitect' Rem Koolhaas and the anti-immigration Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, the film is both a portrait of a place, and of an artist's half-skeptical, half-hopeful attempt to become an agent of social good.
Commission was developed out of a project supported by Sculpture International Rotterdam (SIR) in 2010.
Curator: Tom Morton
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KünstlerInnen: Erik van Lieshout
