Museum Hopping

I've been museum hopping again, and loving every minutes of it.

First, I went to Hermitage in Amsterdam. As I mention earlier, it's the Amsterdam branch of the famous Hermitage in St Petersburg. At this moment they exhibit the Byzantium culture. The collection was beautiful, my favorites was the gift to Alexei, the last tsar's son, made from mother of pearl and three crosses crafted from wood and covered by precious stones and gold. One could see oil lamps and crosses from the early period of Christianity, icons and other relics, and pilgrims' souvenier from the 18th and 19th centuries. In some of the pieces you can see Islamic influence in Christian design. There are even some pieces of the 'true cross', as in the cross upon which Jesus was crucified!


On the following day I went to Stedelijk Museum Centraal Station (SMCS). Their collections are mostly modern. Iranian born Shirin Neshat exhibits her movies on the relationship between male and female in Islamic society. I love her work in Rapture (1999), a black and white film (or I should say films) split in two screens. One screen depicted Arab men in loose-fitting white shirts, roaming around, playing card, praying in a fort. On the other screen women in their traditional black hijab stand rigidly facing forward in a group, wailing and lamenting. Persian poem is written on their hands. The women part reminds me of Theo van Gogh's Submission (2004), where he used Quranic verses about women on naked female body. Some accused van Gogh plagiarized Neshat's work in Submission.

There is posters exhibition by Michel Quarez, which I don't particularly interested.

On the other hand the photographs of Rineke Dijkstra were just superb. She photographed teenagers on the beach, (almost) naked women holding their new born babies, people at Tiergarten in Germany, the transformation from an asylum seeker into 'Dutch girl' in Holland, potraits of matadors, a young recuit of French Foreign Legion and Buzz/Mysteryland video on clubbing scene in England and Holland. Dijkstra shot them almost always frontally, with minimalist background. In the Beach serie, for example, there were almost no shadows that indicate the time of the day when it was taken. However, there' s something about her pictures that make them intimate.

In their Recent Acquisitions part, I love Tord Boontje's work. His works are always very intricate and romantic, but not too romantic that it makes you want to puke.

There's one thing about SMCS that bothers me: lack of direction. You can wander from one exhibition to the other from several entrances. I ended up viewing Dijkstra's exhibition from the end to the beginning. Sure, you get the map of the museum, but a direction would help.