‘…abordons un sujet délicat’ 2018,
Renée Kool & Karin Arink,
used glass, light, movement, and resulting projections
For the collection presentation ‘ART LONGA VITA BREVIS’ in Rijksmuseum Twenthe (RMT) 2018-2021,
I was asked to curate from the RMT collection and install a room around the theme of ‘Controle en Loslaten’ - ‘controll and letting go’.
As collaboration for me is the quintessence of ‘control and letting go’ I chose to foreground my artist collaborations with Renée Kool. The decision to collaborate in this exhibition was a choice to discover other ways of making together, based on mutual questioning (and checking, potentially even ‘controlling’…) and trust (playing and ’letting go’).

So, next to works from the collection of the museum, and works by me, we chose to present our work ‘Instruction.Sculptor.Sculpture 2011.
Renée Kool and me are artist contemporaries and above all friends and sparring partners. We both entered the art scene in the 1990s, during the first larger wave of more visibility for women artists. We both have our own artistic approaches and careers. We both work conceptually and share multiple interests, including language, the body and speculative science fiction.
Our current collaborations are temporary co-authorships in which we both can step outside our own medium. Engaging in other working methods, we have been experimenting together (in co-authorship) since 2018, by building installations from ornamental and utility glass. By means of artificial light and mirrors we project on and through the glassware, creating new composite imaginary landscapes on screens and walls.
For the beautiful glass showcase of Maison the Bonneterie (collection Rijksmuseum Twenthe) we created a new work in collabroation: an installation consisting of glass and (moving) light.
Renée Kool’s large international collection of (design) utility glass is bought on second-hand markets, in thrift stores and even sometimes found cast away. These objects fascinate us because they are cultural carriers in the worldwide flow of objects. Once bought as objects of luxury and embellishment, they are now discarded. The richness and diversity of this large collection of glass makes it possible to build and play with these ‘objets trouvés’.
Glass is a beautiful material that is both clear and hard, and fragile and breakable. A material that is translucent and refracts light.
The result is a moving installation of used glass in precarious balance. Lit from spoecific angles, the shadows and reflection created a colourful scape on the curving museum wall. Here some details:

other works in ‘ART LONGA VITA BREVIS’: ‘FeltFeld’ 2013 / ‘revolving in this sheath of (im)possibilities’ 2011 (ceramic) / ‘Instruction.Sculptor.Sculpture’ 2011 (video) / edited version of ‘jij&ik’ 2001 (text) / ‘recht/tense’ 1995 (plaster) /

other collaboration works: ‘WAT IS TUSSEN ONS’ 2009 (with Ties ten Bosch) / ‘Stories To Tell Each Other’ 2010 (with Sae Inukai) / Instruction.Sculptor.Sculpture 2011 (with Renée Kool) / ‘AAN’ 2019-2020 (with Julie Muller) /