art
Installed in the front gallery of MIRIAM Gallery is a large sandbox populated with a topography of found objects. ‘Sandplay’ is a collaboration between artist Martin La Roche and the artist and writer Mirthe Berentsen. An homage to Dora Kalff’s Jungian sandplay therapy innovated in the 1950s, the interactive piece encourages visitors to play and collaborate as they discover and arrange objects. Over the course of the exhibition, ‘Sandplay sessions’ will be organised—a series of creative, tactile, and collective exercises in which visitors are invited to choose objects from shelves surrounding Sandplay, write ‘I Remember’ statements invoked by the selected objects, then add them to the sandbox where they are free to reorganize materials alongside the other participants.
Press: Art Forum & ArtshockRevista
About Playing | Vom Spielen, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz (DE)
12.02.2023 – 09.04.2023, “Sandplay” (2023) Mirthe Berentsen & Martin La Roche
Play is a creative, profoundly human process. In the same way that children begin to understand the world through play, adults also succeed in understanding their environment anew with freedom and leisure. Great inventions and ideas are often the result of playful coincidences. In particular, artists who follow the often-cited postulate of the ‘functionlessness’ of art create works in free play and with the inclusion of chance, which – like a child – open up the world to the viewer in a new or at least different way. The cultural historian Johan Huizinga argues that all forms of culture have developed out of play.
Mirthe Berentsen (1984, Netherlands) and Martín La Roche (1988, Chile) found each other in their search for words. In 2018, they both took part in the artist-in-residence programme of the Dutch organisation Beautiful Distress in the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, where they were confronted with the boundaries of language. Martín and Mirthe organised artistic workshops for people with different diagnoses and mental health problems during their stay at the hospital. The clients were encouraged to (re)write their narratives and in doing so connect to their own voices and personal stories in a different way.
These shared experiences were a starting point for this Sandplay installation, in which the personal memories and subjective associations become a collective action. This translation into the collective domain takes place in a sandbox where visitors are welcome to sit down and play with a series of collected objects in the sand. The traces of this game shape a constantly changing display.
This artwork is a free interpretation of the sandplay therapy developed by psychoanalyst Dora Kalff in the 1950s. During this therapy objects are taken from a bookshelf and freely placed in a sandbox to create new narratives that could overcome trauma, especially when it seems impossible to translate emotions into words. Similarly, in this installation there is free space to make memory associations with objects.
Press: SWR Kultur & Ausstellung podcast & yyyymmdd & Rhein-Zeitung
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“I Remember”, by Mirthe Berentsen & Martin La Roche Contreras (curated by Inez Piso), Beautiful Distress House, Amsterdam (NL), October 2, 2021 — January 8, 2022
Mirthe Berentsen and Martin La Roche found each other in a search for words. They both participated in the artist-in-residence programme from Beautiful Distress at the psychiatric department of the Kings County Hospital in New York, where they were confronted with the limitations of language. Their journey resulted in this exhibition that deals with the subjective value of memory, questions the constructability of language and translates memories, texts and even words into tangible objects.
With a background in writing, this is the first time Mirthe Berentsen has translated her practice to physical artworks. Using her personal memories of clearing out her parent’s house after their deaths as a point of departure, she photographed the process of throwing away the domestic residues of a life. All the while, questioning the value of the objects we choose as companions during life. These pictures are presented together with replicas of the discarded objects, executed in ceramics and felt, with the help of Roads, an organisation dedicated to the societal inclusion of people with psychiatric challenges.
Martin La Roche shows work that emerged from the workshops he gave at the Kings County Hospital. He asked the participants to share their experiences, traumas and thoughts through constrained writing and visual exercises. One of them was the renaming of different paint samples with personal associations. Some of these relabelled monochromes are presented in a larger format in the exhibition. He also shows mapped objects he gathered during his time at the hospital within a constellation of the many different collections dominating his practice.
In the exhibition, the personal memories and subjective associations of the artists become part of a collective experience. This translation into the collective domain takes place in a sandbox where visitors are welcome to sit down and play with the artworks from the exhibition. This installation is a free interpretation of the Jungian sandplay therapy developed by psychoanalyst Dora Kalff in the 1950s. During this therapy objects are freely placed in a sandbox to create new narratives and overcome trauma, especially when it seems impossible to translate emotions into words.
* To meet the needs of all our visitors, we offer a reduced sensory stimulated experience, weighted objects and earplugs, (sign language) interpreters can be requested and the space is barrier free.
This project is made possible with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fonds, Prins Bernhard Fonds and Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunst and collaborations with ROADS, the Charles Nypels Lab (Margriet Thissen) of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Constant Dullaart, Studio Zoë Claire Miller and graphics by Dongyoung Lee.
PRESS
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‘Sandplay’, Martin La Roche & Mirthe Berentsen, Miriam Gallery NYC, 2023
Mirthe Berentsen & Martin La Roche, 'Sandplay' (activation view), Miriam Gallery NYC, 2023