The city maps Nabuurs&VanDoorn use come from their collection they gathered during the thirty years they together travelled the world. An attempt to categorize, and control, memories of places personal and universal at the same time. By distorting, and/or scratching away color codes, squares of the city grid, and notes, they create space in which new interpretations can emerge in associative ways.
The squares that map the city grid are given form through extrusion, and exformation becomes a metaphor for exclusion. Thresholds for insiders and outsiders that create interferences between white cube and city. The artists then generate and apply new color systems as extensions to their censored maps, to enable associations to bounce off each other and turn the ordinary map into an operating system to navigate through the yet unformed future.
At the same time the scratched-out texts mutiny the clean minimalism of a gridded display. Nabuurs&VanDoorn render color-coded legends meaningless, a deliberate violation of the grids and color charts that remind us of minimalist hard-edge painters to enact the ordering principle of learning by doing. In this obsessive, knowingly absurd effort to recycle and revive experiences, locations, and objects of their past, the artists create a strange and enthralling spectacle of improvisations, games and diaries that takes to task our deepest assumptions about art. Combining traditional paint with paper maps, their memorial explorations blur the boundaries between art and artifact. The keynote to their work lies in their testing of art’s imperatives as a mode of understanding and organizing.
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