Roy Villevoye 2

In the exhibition at Bureau Amsterdam, Villevoye is presenting the photographs 31 December 1999 (1998-99) and 1 January 2000 (1998-99) in which he brings two experiences of time together. The titles refer to the turn of the millennium, which only exists within the Western chronological division of time, while the tranquil images of both photographs conceptually question this promise of 'renewal'. A cultural meeting also takes place in the work 31 December 1999, where colour has been taken as the starting point. The work shows the feet and legs of three Papuans standing on three pieces of coloured paper: yellow, magenta and cyan. These, the primary colours of reproduction - and colour photography - optically merge in the photograph with the Papuans' skin colours, leading to formal, analytically and more socio- politically charged meanings that shift across each other. Moreover, the three pieces of paper being trampled into the mud generates an iconoclastic image. Villevoye is also exhibiting T- shirts, which were worn by people in Irian Jaya and whose presence the shirts bring closer by. The T-shirts have been deliberately reworked with decorative holes and tears. Irian Jaya's climate makes wearing clothes against the cold superfluous. The wearing of textiles is therefore something special, providing people with a new figure and the opportunity to distinguish themselves from others. Some of these old T-shirts have generated a completely new fashion through being torn and tied together again, as can be seen in the eight photographs of people wearing their own reworked T-shirts. Villevoye has printed a photograph of the work Returning (1992-97) in this Newsletter. In two of the photographs, a man from Irian Jaya is wearing a T-shirt in which Villevoye has punched twelve holes. These have been encircled by different tones of make-up. The white shirt contrasts strongly with the man's dark skin. In the two other photographs, Villevoye presents the 'negative', in which the artist is wearing the returned T- shirt. The shirt is extremely dirty and the dark brown colour contrasts with Villevoye's white skin. This cyclical movement of time and place can be traced throughout Villvoye's work. In the back room of Bureau Amsterdam, Villevoye is presenting two bill-boards made by Indian painters and two videos documenting its creation. In 1998, Villevoye and the artist Tiong Ang visited the rapidly disappearing painters' studios in Bombay where the billboards for the Bombay film industry are still hand- painted by craftsmen. At one of the studios, Villevoye commissioned the billboard Kovalam Hairdo (1998) to be painted after two personal photographs of his wife, taken while she was having her hair done by an Indian friend in Kovalam in Southern India. Villevoye had the second billboard, Taxi Girl (1998), painted from a photograph taken of an Indian girl looking at him and his wife through the window of a Bombay taxi. He placed both these billboards in Bombay for a day where, just like real billboards, they fused with visual activity of the street. By placing them in Bureau Amsterdam, Villevoye is introducing them into the context of Western art. Here the bill-boards are hung opposite each other in close proximity to the videos. The video Bombay Taxi Girl (1998- 99) shows the billboard of the same name being signed with the name of the studio 'Art Home' and placed somewhere in Bombay. On two monitors, the video Bombay Rushes (1998-99) shows how several artists and assistants worked on the billboard Kovalam Hairdo. The second monitor plays the same recording, only it starts halfway through the first. Here too Villevoye invokes an experience of time and there in an intrinsic experience of place. Once again different visual languages and meanings are mixed in his work. Photographs are translated into billboards, which are actually paintings. Personal snapshots are blown-up and placed in the public realm of the street and, in the idiom of Indian painted advertising, are furnished with a filmic quality through which photographed reality is transformed into fiction.
http://www.smba.nl/en/exhibitions/passing-time/