Rijksakademie Open Studios 2022, Amsterdam Art Week

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Last weekend I took the train up to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksakademie's 2022 Open Studios, my first time back there since 2019.

You go to this event expecting to discover, in a single visit, the world's most promising young artists all in one place, before they hit the market and achieve fame and shoot beyond your price range. Inevitably, the reality falls short. This year, I felt stupid and obvious and unimaginative - lame's the word, I guess - as my two favourite 'booths' by far were, at opposite ends of the event (studio n°2 and studio n°37, tucked away upstairs before the corridor leading to the bookshop and exit), my own friends'.

In studio n°2, Ali Eslami ('Mr October' in a calendar of Men of the Rijksakademie produced by one of the residents) had mounted a simple but perfect, professional video installation, nothing more than a large custom screen, set at just the right angle and brilliantly backlit in red, a bench to sit on, and a steel structure with a side-view mirror set in a 'capsule' recalling the video, in which you could intriguingly see yourself.



Meanwhile, in studio n°37, Mamali Shafahi had created one of his 'signature' immersive installations, where visitors could sit on a scorpion throne facing a new version of Mamali's robot mouth, now puffing steam, to experience chapter one of Ali and Mamali's nerd_funk,  a VR-centred project about which I've already written at some length.



In the studios between, the quality and level of interest of the installations varied enormously. Quite a lot of the work is studenty, and if it's true that some of the residents have had three years at the Rijks, to compensate for the effects of the Covid pandemic, you sometimes wondered how exactly they'd spent their time, as there was little to show for it. Still, on the whole I think this was a more successful year than 2019, when almost (but not quite) the only studio I really liked was Kévin Bray's. This year, I especially liked a chaotic but fun installation of musical instruments with colourful panels of wry text, another full of the warm scent of spices, one including vases of flowers, and an arrangement of slightly disorienting optical instruments. I could also easily see one of Abul Hisham's little paintings joining my 'wall of miniatures' project at home.














Mamali Shafahi had with him a splendid jacket from Yalda in Tehran. I couldn't resist slipping it on while there.





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