BUY ART
Takes on Transparency
The meaning of transparency is, on its face, clear—it is, after all, a synonym for clarity. And yet, the term has been associated with a wealth of different concepts: The call for transparency in governance is presumed to empower those that are governed. But transparency turns adversarial when the state begins surveilling its citizens. Transparency can function as an element of modernist architecture, for example, when a glass facade enables light to travel fluidly between inside and outside. Or it operates as a trope of modernity itself, symbolising the ideals of openness and visibility, equality and freedom. With this in mind, the exhibition Takes on Transparency brings together four artworks made over the course of the last thirty years, each approaching transparency from a distinct angle:
In Projections from the Observatory (2026), Ilke Gers casts light through a series of inkjet prints of gestural graphite drawings, the final step in a sequence of artistic operations that foreground the material traces of her own visualisation processes, positing them as a challenge to the supposed rational neutrality of scientific, optical and ballistic image technologies.
In Upbringing by Touch (1996/2020), Anchan/Anna Daučíková negotiates (supposedly) transparent media—a sheet of glass and the photographic apparatus—to counter social projections of gender onto her body, taking the right to form her own.
In Monochromatic Studies (2007), Willem Oorebeek has pulled colour over local election posters like sheets of glass, his overprints denaturing the politician’s self-representations. By this simple printer’s gesture, he interrupts the logic of mass-produced visuality and opens up alternative perceptions.
In Fireflies (Lucciole) (2021), a collaboration between Pauline Curnier Jardin and Feel Good Cooperative—a social collective founded by the artist, an architect and a group of sex workers in Rome in 2020—light functions as a situational, relational and ethical medium that unfolds a poetics of transparency and opacity. Illuminated and illuminating, the women negotiate visibility and vulnerability, carving out a space of intimacy and self-care.
In the spirit of the exhibition, it feels fitting to offer our own disclaimers and disclosures: Takes on Transparency does not aim to fully explain or define the concept of transparency. The exhibition grew from guest curator Ruth Noack’s method of thinking through issues with the help of art in an open-ended process of research. It is the materialisation of this process in one instance of exhibition-making and it invites viewers to join in the practice of knowledge production that comes from looking at art.
Additionally, Takes on Transparency was originally inspired by the large glass windows of modernist Haus Lemke by Mies van der Rohe, but when a show conceived for that venue was not selected and remained unrealised, it was out of strong friendship that director Isabelle Sully invited Ruth Noack, a former teacher and ongoing mentor of hers, to materialise her research at A Tale of a Tub. The exhibition therefore finds its home in another piece of historic modernist housing—the Justus van Effencomplex—throughout which architect Michiel Brinkman let function follow form, particularly when it came to the placement of windows. Beyond the complex, the glass window pane also has a larger cultural significance within the Netherlands, with the ‘Dutch window’ being a cultural phenomenon wherein locals leave their large, ground-floor windows uncurtained and open, offering a clear view into their homes, a practice rooted in seventeenth-century Calvinist values and a plight for moral transparency. In the end, though, this exhibition is a way of giving something back, of saying thank you. In its reciprocity of friendship and exhibition-making, a working reality is made transparent, one in which the ever-common though often unshared vulnerability of rejection is laid bare and reconfigured into something else.
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The meaning of transparency is, on its face, clear—it is, after all, a synonym for clarity. And yet, the term has been associated with a wealth of different concepts: The call for transparency in governance is presumed to empower those that are governed. But transparency turns adversarial when the state begins surveilling its citizens. Transparency can function as an element of modernist architecture, for example, when a glass facade enables light to travel fluidly between inside and outside. Or it operates as a trope of modernity itself, symbolising the ideals of openness and visibility, equality and freedom. With this in mind, the exhibition Takes on Transparency brings together four artworks made over the course of the last thirty years, each approaching transparency from a distinct angle:
In Projections from the Observatory (2026), Ilke Gers casts light through a series of inkjet prints of gestural graphite drawings, the final step in a sequence of artistic operations that foreground the material traces of her own visualisation processes, positing them as a challenge to the supposed rational neutrality of scientific, optical and ballistic image technologies.
In Upbringing by Touch (1996/2020), Anchan/Anna Daučíková negotiates (supposedly) transparent media—a sheet of glass and the photographic apparatus—to counter social projections of gender onto her body, taking the right to form her own.
In Monochromatic Studies (2007), Willem Oorebeek has pulled colour over local election posters like sheets of glass, his overprints denaturing the politician’s self-representations. By this simple printer’s gesture, he interrupts the logic of mass-produced visuality and opens up alternative perceptions.
In Fireflies (Lucciole) (2021), a collaboration between Pauline Curnier Jardin and Feel Good Cooperative—a social collective founded by the artist, an architect and a group of sex workers in Rome in 2020—light functions as a situational, relational and ethical medium that unfolds a poetics of transparency and opacity. Illuminated and illuminating, the women negotiate visibility and vulnerability, carving out a space of intimacy and self-care.
In the spirit of the exhibition, it feels fitting to offer our own disclaimers and disclosures: Takes on Transparency does not aim to fully explain or define the concept of transparency. The exhibition grew from guest curator Ruth Noack’s method of thinking through issues with the help of art in an open-ended process of research. It is the materialisation of this process in one instance of exhibition-making and it invites viewers to join in the practice of knowledge production that comes from looking at art.
Additionally, Takes on Transparency was originally inspired by the large glass windows of modernist Haus Lemke by Mies van der Rohe, but when a show conceived for that venue was not selected and remained unrealised, it was out of strong friendship that director Isabelle Sully invited Ruth Noack, a former teacher and ongoing mentor of hers, to materialise her research at A Tale of a Tub. The exhibition therefore finds its home in another piece of historic modernist housing—the Justus van Effencomplex—throughout which architect Michiel Brinkman let function follow form, particularly when it came to the placement of windows. Beyond the complex, the glass window pane also has a larger cultural significance within the Netherlands, with the ‘Dutch window’ being a cultural phenomenon wherein locals leave their large, ground-floor windows uncurtained and open, offering a clear view into their homes, a practice rooted in seventeenth-century Calvinist values and a plight for moral transparency. In the end, though, this exhibition is a way of giving something back, of saying thank you. In its reciprocity of friendship and exhibition-making, a working reality is made transparent, one in which the ever-common though often unshared vulnerability of rejection is laid bare and reconfigured into something else.
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