Hendrik-Jan Hunneman created his environmental work Kiss & Go especially for De Vleeshal.
Photo(s): Leo van Kampen
Hendrik-Jan Hunneman’s site specific work for De Vleeshal Kiss & Go consisted of two 5 metre high yellow walls, hiding two 23 metre long staircases. These staircases led visitors slowly up from the back of De Vleeshal, past the facade and finally back down again. This course provided both surprising and spectacular vistas.
In Kiss & Go Hunneman explored the borderland between the visual arts and architecture, as he has done in earlier works. His unerring sense of scale and size and his use of architectural concepts such as stairs and walls were closely related to architecture. What is more, the confusion arising from the lack of a clear purpose to these stairs and walls referred to the sense of detachment evoked by much modern architecture and urban development. The materials used by Hunneman (industrial outside wall panelling and white coated hardboard) had a chic and, at the same time, industrial look. By combining this look with large, lucid forms closely integrated with architecture, he manipulated visitors` experience of the environment. With this interest in our sensory and physical experience of our environment, Hunneman ventured into the field of the visual arts. The title Kiss & Go referred to a new, more theatrical dimension to Hunneman’s work. Whenever visitors met (Kiss) and passed (Go) each other in the work, they were both spectator and actor to each other.
Hendrik-Jan Hunneman`s project for De Vleeshal was the third in a series of exhibitions examining the relationship between the visual arts and architecture. The first exhibition featured Krijn de Koning (Beeld voor De Vleeshal, 2000); the second Ana Maria Tavares (Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer at De Vleeshal and Numinoso at De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, 2001). This series focuses on the power of the visual arts to reveal taboos and omissions in current thought on architecture.
