Farewell to the Institutions: KIRAC 24 — Under a Sinking Sun

In 2018, KIRAC made a film about the Gerrit Rietveld Academie's decision to cancel a KIRAC screening. It became a unique film because, in this case, the cancelled parties managed to persuade the cancellers to take part in a discussion on stage. It is a portrait of the confusion that arises when an alienated management with no affinity for art tries to limit the damage to its reputation by going along with the iconoclasm of a handful of art-school students so neglected and deprived of knowledge and prospects that the only meaningful relationship they can form with their surroundings consists in identifying a scapegoat.

This complicated role as scapegoat proved highly fruitful for KIRAC: a starting point for an artwork about alienation, justice and nihilism. The episode was shown at the cultural centre De Balie in Amsterdam and was received by the audience as an exciting, nuanced and, moreover, relevant artwork. Its title, Stigma, was a prediction that is coming true: these days, a monstrous reputation always and everywhere precedes us through the woke grapevine. A reputation is something you play with wholeheartedly as an artist. It is a never-ending affair, and for that very reason an inexhaustible source of artistic and unexpected possibilities.

KIRAC's reputation has led young people who, like KIRAC, had been cancelled for various reasons to approach it in recent years. Maria was not allowed to show the film she made about her experiences of violence and sexual abuse at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie because it might unsettle other students. Jini, the heroine of Honeypot and now again of Under a Sinking Sun, was also cancelled: after she broke up with a fellow philosophy student, he took revenge by falsely accusing her of rape before the student association, with the result that she was expelled without being heard.

Then came Juliaan Andeweg, the artist whom a group of women accused of assault, sexual assault and rape in an NRC article in 2020. KIRAC decided to take on this subject out of the conviction that, as an artist, you are not worth a damn if you can only make art about subjects proven innocent and therefore harmless. Juliaan Andeweg has been accused but has not yet been found guilty or convicted, and this uncertain state makes him all the more frightening in the eyes of outsiders. People simply do not know where to place him.

KIRAC is making a film amid, and about, this moral confusion, without being able or willing to appeal to Juliaan Andeweg's guilt or innocence. That judgment will, after all, be delivered in court, and even that does not, strictly speaking, rule out the existence of guilt or innocence. KIRAC observes social and cultural processes and makes them visible through performances. The reception of Juliaan Andeweg on horseback at the Honeypot screening was one such performance, whose nature remains ambiguous and mysterious even to its makers for as long as the artwork is unfinished. So although KIRAC can be open about its working method, it cannot yet say exactly what this performance means. For now, it is an expression of the frightening, uncertain figure of Juliaan Andeweg. An apotropaic knight on horseback.

Its full, complex and nuanced meaning will emerge in the future film. In this, KIRAC appeals to trust in, and respect for, the democratic function of the artwork, which can reveal truths different from, say, a court ruling. Art attends to the truths of human nature.

Opponents of this way of working, incidentally, want to suggest that KIRAC proceeds without any understanding or knowledge of sexual violence. They assume that, if you did understand it, you would never make art about it in this way: in a way that can be mistaken for glorification. But what if traumatic events can sometimes bear the light of day only in sublimated form, in a form that stands out, hard, beautiful and impenetrable, against the feelings of weakness, pain and shame with which trauma ordinarily presents itself? That sublimation resembles glorification is not reprehensible; it is a psychological connection worth exploring. To say it should not be allowed in this way is therefore also to say it should not be allowed at all.

Ironically, anyone seeking to deny this art a platform embodies precisely the patriarchy that suppresses every form of deviation by dictating how particular subjects may and may not be treated. This is exactly what feminists have resisted. They fought for women to be able to approach subjects in their own way, rather than being forced by a figurative male gynaecologist to give birth lying on their backs so he can reach more easily.

I wrote the paragraphs above in the run-up to the premiere of KIRAC's latest film, which was due to take place this coming Saturday, 2 April, at KIOSK, a gallery affiliated with Ghent's KASK art academy. Under a Sinking Sun was made in collaboration with graduating KASK students and concerns the desires and illusions of young people coming of age in a world that is taking leave of the Enlightenment and its values: the cheerful anticipation with which they face the possibilities of a setting sun.

Months before the premiere, KIOSK director Simon Delobel began receiving messages from complete strangers warning him of the danger posed by KIRAC. As time passed, the messages became more insistent and came from “well-meaning” colleagues. The pressure on Simon became so great that he wrote in a press release that he was prepared to lose his job over Under a Sinking Sun.

Somehow, Simon's enthusiasm and that of the students made me feel that the modest history of 2018 would not repeat itself. That feeling proved utterly naïve when KASK dean Filip Rathé overrode Simon's autonomy last night and summarily cancelled the premiere. The entire KASK campus will be closed on Saturday, 2 April, because, in the board's words, it “cannot guarantee safety”. Once again, management gives in to the demands of anonymous, inflammatory collectives that threaten on social media to throw faeces, never engage in discussion and, above all, want discussion in general to be eradicated.

If the malaise of our time is an inability to distinguish the literal from the figurative, then the dissolution of the premiere of a film about dissolution provides a fitting ending. Nonetheless, I find it a sad outcome. With this, KIRAC definitively takes leave of the institutions, which foster a rotten climate in which no art can flourish. Art is in the hand that makes it, not in the hand that smothers it.

Kate Sinha