Opening the 28th of March at 14H30 in exhibition space KATE at Nieuw en Meer Amsterdam, Re-coding the Comatorium suggests an active process of reinterpreting and transforming established codes—both the digital codes that overlay Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s architectural and photographic interventions, and the societal narratives that shape our collective memory. The term "comatorium" hints at a communal space where the reconfigured perspectives converge, inviting the audience to become part of an evolving, participatory dialogue. The title effectively encapsulates the exhibition’s exploration of shifting boundaries and the interplay between documentation and intervention, between a state of suspension and a space of spectatorship.
The artists post-performance walk From Vessel to Vessel, at first glance, looks like an architectural intervention. A stripe that cuts space into an above and below, a beginning and end, a before and after. Together, forty points re-form the line Nabuurs&VanDoorn mapped in public space but they now scaled all the different locations in one single perspective. Unlike a postcard that reduces all impressions into a single image that highlights the identity of a city, the first impression the architectural stripe reveals is the interconnected digital colorcode. All forty perspectives now exist and overlap in the same spacetime to open up reality and question the identity of Amsterdam.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn created an architectural intervention to seduce the spectator before they realise something is wrong. In front of the work, with each of forty perspectives marked by a digitally added colorcode, confusion arises over the logic of meaning and categories, since no explanation is handed concerning the code. The black and white photograph of each location is partly cancelled by this digital addition. Documentation is expected to reflect the truth, but the colorcode is a hint that what we see is not what we are looking at. Instead of truth, we encounter a code, and surrogate for, some unknown agency. It makes us realise seeing a constellation of gaps made visual by the digital addition.
If anything can be said about what controls these colorcodes, it most surely comes from the sleek minimalism of a display represented by grids and colorfields that remind us of minimalist hard-edge painters. The grid that announces modern Art’s will to silence. The grid that is anti-natural, antinarrative, and antireal. The grid as a myth of modern cults leaves no place for refuge.
In their obsessive, deliberately absurd attempt to recycle and revive real-life experiences, locations and perspectives, Nabuurs&VanDoorn created a strange and captivating scene of improvisation, game and intervention that subverts their deepest assumptions about art. Combining traditional black and white photography with digital manipulations, the artists explorations of reality blur the lines between art and documentation, fact and fiction, private and public, standard and deviant, self and other, life and afterlife.
At one point during the production of this work Nabuurs&VanDoorn were boxed in by two police cars and apprehanded by the Amsterdam police force for performing shady activities. The artists are not interested in educating the spectator but by using modern forms they want the spectator to think about the fake flamboyance of freedom. The core of their work lies in testing the imperatives of art.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn tied together forty perspectives through the narrative construct of a travelogue, put different activities in one structure, dreamed a map, and created a code. A new language in which they show their understanding of truth and memory, as fiction.
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