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H+F Curatorial Grant

admin — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:47:14 +0000

The FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, the De Appel Arts Centre (Amsterdam) and the private collector Han Nefkens (H + F Collection) present the third recipient of the H + F Curatorial Grant.

Created in 2007 by the three above partners and the Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), this ambitious and original initiative gives an opportunity for young international curators to develop exhibition projects using the collection of the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais.

This grant gives recipients the unique possibility to express their visions and points of view while giving the public a chance to discover new exhibition propositions. The FRAC wishes to establish audacious and original artistic initiatives which will enhance collaborations with various institutions (museums, schools, universities, non-profit associations, individuals…) while favouring the development of networks throughout a variety of territories.

The recipient of the first grant, Annette Schemmel, left the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais at the start of 2009, after having developed her project “Decollecting”, which travelled widely throughout the euroregional territory. In 2009, Lumi Tan (a young curator from New York) was chosen to work with the H+F and FRAC collections, notably for the flagship project “Pilot Light /contemporary artists’ reflections on AIDS”

For the third year of the H + F Curatorial Grant, the jury, composed of Han Nefkens

(H+F Collection), Ann Demeester (Director of De Appel) and Hilde Teerlinck (Director of the FRAC), was won over by Irene Aristizabal and the vision she has of the FRAC collection.

The arrival of Irene as a new exhibition curator on the FRAC staff next July will not only allow the organization to give a new view of the collection (development of travelling exhibitions…), but also to benefit from an outside point of view on the development project of the new site. She will enrich discussion and participate actively in the life of the FRAC.

This grant is made possible by the generous support of arts patron Han Nefkens (journalist, writer and art collector). It allows the FRAC to reinforce its action of developing a strong and active policy of private support for its activities. This collaboration also accompanies our desire to communicate and create bridges between the cultural and private sectors. Also, the long-term loans of works from the H + F Collection, to the benefit of various international museums and notably the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais (48 works on loan for 5 years), provide additional resources for Curatorial Grant projects.

More about Han Nefkens as a writer

admin — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:59:16 +0000

In addition to his involvement in the world of contemporary art, Han Nefkens is also a writer. He made his debut in 1995 with the semi-autobiographical novel Bloedverwanten (Blood Brothers), which was followed in 2005 by the collection Twee lege stoelen (Two Empty Chairs). In June 2008 his third book, De gevlogen vogel – notities over een herwonnen leven (Borrowed Time), was published by Uitgeverij Atlas. In that work, Nefkens writes about his recovery from encephalitis in the winter of 2001-2002.

‘I’m forty-eight years old and I have to learn to walk again. I’m not convinced it’s such a great idea, but I don’t see any alternative. You’ve got to walk. They never ask you if you feel like it. They never ask you what you prefer: fish or chicken or vegetarian. Life is no Singapore Airlines.’

The catalogue Han Nefkens, 10 Years of Patronage (2011) provides an overview of the diversity and abundance of the activities in which Nefkens is involved. It also contains an interview with Ingrid Harms and short texts written by Han Nefkens himself.

More work by Nefkens (in Dutch) can be found on his literary website, www.hannefkens.nl

Han Nefkens, 10 Years of Patronage, 2011

De gevlogen vogel, 2008
On the cover: Untitled (negtent) by Hrafnkell Sigurdsson (H+F Collection)

Twee lege stoelen, 2005
On the cover: “Untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (H+F Collection)

Bloedverwanten, 1995

More about Han Nefkens as a collector

admin — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:59:00 +0000

Vulnerability as powerMoments that don’t slip away

Alex de Vries

Rotterdam, the sixties. A little boy walks through the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. The parquet cracks beneath his feet. He walks through the great rooms, passes through a door and makes his way to the smaller galleries. Stopping at one of the bays, he sits down and stares at a painting. He just sits there, lost in himself. He dissolves. Without any apparent explanation, he knows more than he did before. Art is a puzzle you don’t have to solve. Its secret is its secretiveness.

n October 1999, Han Nefkens (Rotterdam, 1954) and a close friend he’s known since he was eleven discuss the declining share prices on Wall Street. They’re in New York, and for the first time in several years the Dow Jones has taken a two to three percent plunge. Up until then Nefkens has invested his disposable income in stocks, bonds and deposits. He does the math and calculates his losses. Then his friend says, ‘Forget stocks. Why not buy art instead?’ And from that day on, Nefkens switches his focus from ideas like investment and capital. He sells his shares and begins to steep himself in contemporary art. He’s always been an art lover; he grew up with art all around him. His father, an architect and building contractor, had a special taste for ancient art, pre-Colombian artifacts and other curiosities. Yet it was never that background that led Han Nefkens to enter into an intense relationship with the world of art. In the seventies he studied communications in France and later in the United States. He began working as a radio correspondent in Mexico. With his fortunate financial situation – he receives an allowance from the family estate – he had always tried to be as level-headed as possible. But in October 1999 he changed his strategy. ‘It felt like a perfect fit,’ says Nefkens. ‘It felt good.’

The ‘problem’ was that at the time Han Nefkens knew nothing about collecting art and was not aware of current practices in the contemporary art world. So for months he immersed himself in exhibitions, fairs, magazines and other trade literature to get an idea of what was going on, and he developed a plan and a structure for building up a significant, distinctive collection that might also be of use to museums. He read Artforum, Flashart, Parkett, Kunstforum, and he visited galleries and museums. A good friend put him in contact with Sjarel Ex, then the director of the Central Museum in Utrecht and now of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. For six months they carried on regular discussions. Nefkens had still not purchased a single work of art. Then they met at the Basel Art Fair in June 2000. Ex proposed that they each visit the fair separately, take notes of their preferences and compare them. Their lists of preferences overlapped to a significant degree: Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, Bernard Frize, Bill Viola and others. At that point Han Nefkens made another deliberate decision, a decisive moment: the money he had earmarked for art purchases for the coming five years he would spend that very day. The H&F Collection, named after Han and his lifelong partner Felipe, was born. He and Ex came to an immediate agreement concerning the long-term loan of related parts of his collection that are in line with the Central Museum’s collection policy. Later he made similar agreements with other art institutions such as the museum in Reykjavik, De Pont in Tilburg, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam and the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

Characteristic of the work he purchases is its photographic aspect, even if the artist was not working with photography as a medium. ‘This photo could be a painting,’ he says, ‘and the painting could be a photo. I’m intrigued when the medium doesn’t dictate the content. I like it when at first glance you’re not sure if it’s a photo or a painting.’ Nefkens does not buy photographs as such. He buys art. What the works have in common visually is the attempt to tie down what is usually transitory. It is art that holds its breath; everything is momentarily timeless. This apparent contradiction has a certain restrained quality. Something that cannot be expressed assumes a certain form, often not recognizable but certainly personal, certainly obvious. And there is a quality in the work that Nefkens himself calls ‘the power of the understatement.’ You might also call it the ensoulment of the work. In a certain sense they’re all clichés that are negated by the work of art itself, because they demonstrate their importance directly without having to explain it. As a viewer you yourself must look for the explanation. The art has already done its work. Making a work of art involves totally different responsibilities than looking at it.

Han Nefkens recognizes the need for dogma. He also recognizes it for himself. Dogma is the quality of making art that can be analyzed by means of judgment based on objective criteria. Such analysis might free contemporary art from the stigma that has been attached to it for so long, the ‘Oh, I could do that’ response. Why no one except the artist actually does it is a puzzle, however, for which no one has come up with a solution. And the very unfathomable quality of the image – the enigma of art – is the great fascination for Nefkens, the reason for putting his collection together. His purpose is not to unravel the secret of art but to identify it as such, in its enigmatic quality. ‘Art has the same function as air, water and food: it’s essential for our lives, not as a luxury or pastime, but as a basic and indispensable condition of our existence.’

Nefkens’s own life and his own development are decisive factors in the choice he makes as a collector and in the kind of collector he wants to be. He does not see his art purchases as a financial investment, since by housing his collection directly in museums and leaving it to those museums after his death he takes economic distance from them. The important thing for him is the meaning of the work of art in a broader context: life as such and the role that art plays in life. His fascination with works of art in which the perfect moment takes shape and assumes an enduring form that can take on other meanings just by being looked at again and again is partly the result of personal circumstances. ‘The personal is political’ is an almost incontestable statement from the women’s movement of the seventies and eighties, and in the case of Han Nefkens ‘the personal is art’ is equally incontestable. He is convinced that it is becoming more and more important to demonstrate the usefulness of art because of its objective uselessness and lack of functionality. The fact that what can actually be derived from art is to be found in something more substantial than the economic payoff from things that are stable in value – although the art industry itself contributes to this to a great extent – is a notion that must be fully recognized by politicians and decision makers.

In 1987 Han Nefkens learned that he was HIV positive, and from that moment of truth, with its bald inescapability, everything changed. Everything that he had passed by without giving it much thought up until then became at least as inescapable as his infection with HIV. Totally dependent on medication, and on the continuous development of new and better medicines, he embarked on a crazy quilt life that amounted to living on borrowed time. He realized that each moment can be decisive in life and that he could not allow himself to attach less meaning to one moment than the next, to one experience than the next. Yet it’s impossible to live each moment as if it were the last. How can you experience the fact that there is no moment that doesn’t matter? Han Nefkens found that experience in art.

‘I’d like to be a fly on the wall in the museum and see the people looking, listen to them talking. How does the art I’ve collected affect people?’ Nefkens is convinced that art can obliterate fundamental human loneliness, or at least lighten it. ‘If a work of art touches you, and you see that it does something to someone else, your loneliness dissolves.’ Yet he does not see art as the proverbial solace that it can offer. Art does much more than that. Art provides insight, enabling you to recognize something in life that you weren’t aware of before. What Han Nefkens would like to do is to take the personal satisfaction produced by that insight and make it productive in a useful way. During the bi-annual international AIDS congress that was held in Bangkok in 2004 he commissioned Thai artists and artists from the region to produce works with AIDS as their point of departure. In addition, he and Hilde Teerlinck of CRAC Alsace have asked ten international artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sue Williamson and Shirin Neshat among others, to make posters based on the theme of the conference: ‘Access for All.’ The results were printed in an edition of fifty by the Mulhouse Art Academy in France, and the proceeds of the sale will be used to benefit children with AIDS in Thailand. Both exhibitions were shown in The Queen’s Gallery in Bangkok during the conference. The ‘Access for All’ posters are now part of a traveling exhibition and are being shown in museums throughout Europe.

That activity gave him the personal satisfaction of knowing that art and the fight against AIDS go well together, and give his activities as a collector extra meaning and an added dimension. Now he’s making plans to be more active in the art world, not only as a collector but as a patron as well, thereby stimulating art in another way and filling an important social role. The ‘Art AIDS’ foundation he is establishing is a result of those plans. His goal is to de-stigmatize AIDS by means of art and to create awareness, especially in areas where keeping things under wraps has always been seen as a better approach than addressing the problem and fighting it. The sale of the works of art that will be commissioned through ‘Art AIDS’ will be used to benefit AIDS projects in different parts of the world. But he’s got new plans for his patronage as well, plans that must be realized in the coming years together with the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. In fact, these plans mean an expansion of family responsibilities for Han Nefkens. After his mother died of cancer in 1971, his father set up the Josephine Nefkens Foundation, which contributes to cancer research and development cooperation.

In his apartment in Barcelona a work by Jörg Sasse is hanging on the wall. It’s a landscape composed of many images, with a prosaic gate to the right, a hilly area in the middle and a hazy vista on the left. On the hill, which might be covered with sand or snow or a fine powder, there are footsteps. They start suddenly, somewhere, just like that, and they end suddenly, just like that. These footsteps, which aren’t going anywhere, dissolve the person who left them behind. His presence can be demonstrated by an investigation of his tracks, but his form can no longer be retrieved. It can only be imagined. Even when art doesn’t depict anything it always makes a proposal. The idea is to discover what you want to see. Yet for Nefkens, collecting art is not a form of self-realization. Self-realization is what he strives for in his work as an author. His moving novel ‘Bloedverwanten’ (Wereldbibliotheek, 1995) about two brothers who hide their real feelings for each other, plus the short pieces he regularly publishes, are proof of that.

Human weakness is a virtue – something Han Nefkens knows from experience. A few years ago he was struck by encephalitis, which brought him to the brink of death. His recovery was slow, and he had to relearn all the things he had long ago mastered: writing, reading, talking, walking. For a long time he could only grasp a few of the details inherent in the relationships between things. All he could see of the whole were discrete bits, and he wasn’t able to connect them. Reading a book or watching a film was not impossible, but what he read and saw was not what other people read and saw. Works of art, on the other hand, which present themselves in a single image, were able to touch him as never before. He remembered that as a child in his parents’ home he always looked at the same painting, until one day he walked into the room and found himself totally surprised by that very work. It was with the same intense and sudden insight that he experienced his own art collection during his recovery from encephalitis, mortally afraid that he would no longer be able to see anything in it. But just the opposite was true. More than ever the works revealed their mystery to him, their meaning in their inexplicable presence. And from that collection he came to understand once more the connection, the intercultural synthesis of works of art from all parts of the world that really do have something in common, united in the intention – which he shares – to demonstrate the power of human vulnerability.

15 April 2005

(translation: Nancy Forest-Flier)

This essay was first published in The Suspended Moment, a French-English-German-Dutch exhibition catalogue with texts by Hilde Teerlinck, Hilde van Gelder, Alex de Vries and Pascale Saarbach (2005).

The Suspended Moment is distributed by IDEA books and can be ordered through your local bookshop.
ISBN: 2-911660-11-0

Exhibition The Suspended Moment

Sharing a vision

admin — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:58:55 +0000

Han Nefkens

Writer and collector Han Nefkens (Rotterdam, 1954) purchases international contemporary art with the express purpose of giving it to museums on long-term loan. ‘For me it’s about much, much more than owning a work of art: it’s about sharing a vision with other people.’

Han Nefkens first joined forces with the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. In 1999, while searching for a way to make his collection accessible to a wider public, Nefkens approached the museum’s then director, Sjarel Ex. It was to become a productive and intensive partnership. Within a short period of time the museum was given works by Bill Viola, Tony Oursler and Pipilotti Rist on long-term loan. Later acquisitions were to follow, including work by Shirin Neshat, Sam Taylor-Wood, Thomas Rentmeister, Dan Graham and Diana Thater.

In addition to the Centraal Museum, from 2000 onwards Nefkens also granted works of art on long-term loan to the Folkwang Museum in Essen, De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Museum Het Domein in Sittard and the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk. Most loans will be left with their respective museums as bequests.

Since 2005 Nefkens has mainly bought works intended for specific exhibitions and other projects.

In 2006, in consultation with Els Barents, director of Huis Marseille, he bought the photos shown in the Whisper Not! exhibition; in 2007, on the occasion of the exhibition David Goldblatt: Intersections in Huis Marseille he bought ten photos from the series ‘AIDS Landscapes’ by this South-African photographer.

In 2005, after close consultation with Nefkens, curator Hilde Teerlinck created the travelling exhibition The Suspended Moment, and this collaboration was continued in 2007 with the exhibition So Close/So Far Away.

A number of works were also purchased or commissioned for the 2007 exhibition Choix d’artistes at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.

‘I’d like to be a fly on the wall in the museum and see the people looking, listen to them talking. How does the art I’ve collected affect people?’

More about Han Nefkens as a collector

More about Han Nefkens as a writer

Other projects by Han Nefkens:

ArtAids

H+F Curatorial Grant

H+F Fashion on the Edge

H+F Patronage