Below Sea Level – Jewellery from the Netherlands

Artist list

Ruudt Peters, Ted Noten, Lucy Sarneel, Manon van Kouswijk, Evert Nijland, Jantje Fleischhut, Gésine Hackenberg, Iris Nieuwenburg, Nhat-Vu Dang

Today jewellery in the Netherlands is versatile; many different sources of inspiration, approaches and styles co-exist. Yet there is a mentality and an engagement that goes much further than just aesthetics. One can identify certain key notions that touch the chore of this approach: questioning, experimenting, abstraction, consistency, and the tendency to do things well but with a playful touch, to investigate profoundly and to work with a qualifying concept or narrative. The selected artists are all different and unique in their approach, but share the same inquiring mentality. The selection includes an iconoclast, an entertaining conceptualist, a joyous zinc smith, a chain artist, a romanticist, a designer in synthetic materials, a still life pictorialist, a storyteller and a playful abstractionist – together they present Dutch jewellery in all its broadness.

Curated by Liesbeth den Besten, assisted by Lisa Goudsmit

Below Sea Level – Jewellery from the Netherlands is part of the Parallel program of the From the Coolest Corner Symposium. Find out more here.

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Wanna Swap Your Ring

The exhibition will also present the renowned project “Wanna Swap Your Ring” by Atelier Ted Noten. The installation consist of 500 Miss Piggy-rings in shocking pink mounted on the wall of the exhibition space, all placed within the imaginary contours of a handgun. Spectators can obtain a ring made by the master by replacing it with an old one of theirs. What counts is not the value. Noten is equally happy to receive precious rings or cheap ones. What counts is the exchange of old stories and new ones. All the stories together will gradually fill the pistol-shape, changing the symbol of aggression into a charming and multi-faceted scene. A shift in meaning occurs, as is often the case in work by Noten, who has a penchant for combining opposing symbols. For the attentive viewer, the interactive installation holds countless different meanings.