A conversation with Fréderique Scholtes and Kimiya Jahanshahi from Van Abbehuis.

Left assistant-curator Kimiya Jahanshahi, right director Fréderique Scholtes, cc Cisza de Buck

Van Abbehuis is a house for contemporary art, built in 1919 by cigar manufacturer Henri Van Abbe. He and his family used to live in the house, across the street from the Van Abbemuseum they founded. Van Abbehuis houses exhibitions, events and residencies and functions as a space where contemporary art is approached through local infrastructures and reciprocal forms of authorship. The exhibitions and residencies in the villa relate through the infrastructure its rooms that are based on their former residential function: a gallery space, a working office, a library, a cellar, a café, and a garden. On the top floors, studio’s of different artists are housed.

For Daily Lazy, we spoke with Fréderique Scholtes, director of Van Abbehuis, and Kimiya Jahanshahi, assistant curator, about the institution’s evolving program. 

Irini Miga: In what ways does the specificity of the house shape the curatorial and operational logic of Van Abbehuis?

Fréderique Scholtes: The specificity of a house, to be able to contextualize contemporary art in a domestic, residential setting, calls out to both of us. Its infrastructure is build up in a sort of rudimentary way, the influence on art here is in the realm of necessity outside of the context you’re working for. Since I was appointed director, we’ve housed exhibitions so far with artists like Estéfana Román Matesanz, Etienne Chambaud and gabi dao, next to radio initiatives, museal collections and hip hop collectives.

Mira Dayal Map 40°43’15.0″N 73°59’05.51″W, centraal museum negatives

IM:  Eindhoven has a strong industrial and design legacy shaped by actors like ASML (former Philips), high tech chip developer and Design Academy Eindhoven, adhering to upscaling and innovation. How does the environment of the city influence Van Abbehuis Foundation’s programming and partnerships?

FS: In the next years there are plans to build a Rijksmuseum dependance here; the first in the southern region of the Netherlands. The city lost a few good small independent spaces over the last years, like Stroomhuis and Apollohuis.. the -huis affix is accidental. Eindhoven is influenced by its periphery context; it grew fast in post-industrialisation and speaks a language of the existence for speculative values. Spaces often unconsciously inherit the grammar of the cities they inhabit, and our curatorial viewpoint sits slightly orthogonal to its accelerationism.  Kimiya Jahanshahi: Our logic is based on this idea of test-sites and the creation of provisional structures through the development of connections to counterculture in the city. We work with artists that work immaterial, social or conceptual. We connect them to local initiatives, substituting an institutional network with informal encounters with people who are implied in certain art contexts without necessarily having a direct relation to them yet.

bureau parso, Wonhyeongdeul, cc Nam Seung Rok

IM:  What is your long-term vision for the institution, and what curatorial priorities will define your first years?

KJ: Innate to our exhibitions and residencies we host events every Wednesday through the restaging of Tom Marioni’s 1970s Café Wednesday. For us this is a more non-occassional way of programming; the billiard room, the library, garden and exhibitions do not operate as isolated departments, but respond to each other. Someone can enter through our radio show, return for a Swidzinski reading and ends up in a cassette tape performance. The works in Van Abbehuis exist somewhere in between, as a house where ideas travel, bodies reinterpret them, and audiences encounter them again under new conditions.

FS: It’s a call and response method, where artists host contradictions without prematurely resolving them. As a result, exhibitions can mutate mid-presentation, for example with next months show with it is part of an ensemble, in which participatory elements changes the setting of the space throughout its running time. Our priority is to build reciprocration that is unexpected, as Kimiya says, where artists and visitors formulate themselves in our billiard room to produce social life before it gets hardened into cultural product.

Marijn van Kreij, Akiko Wakabayashi, A New Corner, library cc Lucy Schreurs

IM:  In balancing local relevance with international reach, what does meaningful engagement actually look like for you in Eindhoven—who are you prioritizing, and what concrete steps will you take to involve underrepresented communities as active participants?

 FS: ‘Communities’ is one of the most abused words in current institutional language. It assumes harmony where there is asymmetry and exclusion. Some of the present universal art values are still based on stereotypes, which shapes a reality that exists nowhere. Discourse that is inhabitable outside of its language begins by abandoning the fantasy that participation is automatically emancipatory. Its our objective to liquidate hierarchy, to become more adjacent to the meaning which society imposes on contemporary reality. This doesn’t mean that accessibility should be synonymous to simplification. The interplay of alien perspectives may cause reciprocal formations; the interest of one group may match that of another, but the reverse could also happen. For us the question of inclusion is focused on creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to evenly exert pressure on the program.

Jakub Jansa, Club of Oppertunities – episode 7, cc Lucy Schreurs

IM:  Could you talk to us about an exciting project for the upcoming year?

FS: Currently we’re working together with Text my Sister, a decentralized platform for contemporary art. Now being honorary sisters, we’re looking forward to curate a public program together next year. Next to the events, I’m personally looking forward to this years exhibition of Gummbah, with works like Luuk Tuijmans and World War One or Two. Its also going to be great to work closer with Corpo Máquina, a performance society based in Tilburg.

 KJ: I am particularly interested in the trajectory around Cem A.’s Double Bind; they transform the house into a debate space, and next years residency period with Danielle Lemaire.

Tom Marioni, Out of Body Circle Drawing, Quay Quinn Wolf, I’m evaluating into something weightless , Ghislaine Leung, Monitors

IM: How do you see this institution contributing to the Dutch cultural landscape?

FS: In a recent article I wrote about our national cultural policies together with curator Maziar Afrassiabi, we signalled that its current logic increasingly aligns with that of the political fundable agenda, while social, political, economic, and climate-related problems continue to worsen. Socially engaged art, political art, artistic research, art derived from cultural studies, ecological art, activist art, art as entrepreneurship, the commons, and art as social work finds itself incapable of setting an agenda from a position of difference in relation to the status quo, and instead positions itself following along its lines. As a result, in its current state these art forms become ironically depoliticized, devoid of the urgency required for the emergence of a new movement. 

Yi Zhang, Eshwari Ramsali, Baltan Misery Mixer, cc Barbara Medo

IM: What distinguishes your approach in programming?

 KJ: We program in a manner that is actively inconsistent with dominant economic or cultural powers in the world, which from an institutional standpoint requires questioning the structures through which cultural value is produced in the first place.

FS: In a landscape where artistic production can become a collection of things happening only for the sake of happening, we seek developments that are more or less unpredictable. In our program we’re not looking to communicate consensus, but rather an environment where difference, as opposed to consensus, is emphasized.

Estéfana Román Matesanz, tired shirt holder, Laura López Ferrer, Lisa Kiesgen, Ana Paula Lemus Payiatsou, Leonie Schwarzmann, Gaia Cavagliá, cc Jonna Bruinsma

BIOS

Fréderique Scholtes (NL, 1995) is director of Van Abbehuis. Between 2016 and 2024, she worked as a curator in NL and Belgium, a.o for museums and dance houses. She publishes regularly about contemporary art and cultural policy, a.o for Mister Motley and PlatformBK. She teaches at Utrecht School of the Arts since 2019 and serves as chair of the board of artist-run space LEO XIII.

Kimiya Jahanshahi is assistant curator at Van Abbehuis. She is a writer and artist, working on the circulation of artistic labour in relation to migration. Her work considers both poetic and political structures with a focus on sculptural elements. She presented at various art spaces throughout Teheran, Iran and the Netherlands since 2019.

Irini Miga is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and an editor at Daily Lazy. She works between New York and Athens, Greece.