Opening speech Dirk van Weelden | Thursday January 21, 2023
Opening speech Dirk van Weelden | January 23 2023 | Vera Gulikers
Our lives are overflowing with images, symbols, styles, memes, and quotes that make us understandable—and hopefully appealing—to others. This is how we modulate our voices, how our vocabulary changes as we leave middle school and fall in love, how we dress, how we decorate our rooms, how we apply our makeup, and how we choose where to shop and go out. And online, we share our likes, selfies, and comments.
You could view all of that as an aura composed of sounds, gestures, colors, shapes, words, and symbols—a semiotic cloud wrapped around our naked bodies. A safe, thick coat in which we move through the dangerous space of the world to be seen and appreciated by colleagues, friends, acquaintances, family, and passersby.
You can’t do without a coat like that. But even if you genuinely love, say, pink or bottle green, and Taylor Swift and Filling Pieces shoes and reruns of Grey’s Anatomy, the books by Otessa Moshfegh, and you like the photos of Lisa’s birthday cake and Daphne’s podcasts, and you secretly find yourself attractive in your psychedelic-colored flared yoga pants—that safe, thick coat is also a prison.
Because it’s a social construct, the mask forces you to stay within your role. The thing is, you are, and know, and feel, and long for infinitely more. There are so many things—important, terrible, unbearable, ridiculous, and indescribably beautiful too—that aren’t communicated at all by that seemingly rich, multicolored, eloquent, and meaningful cloud in which you live.
You depend on that thick coat, but it also turns you into a caricature and subjects you to norms and power dynamics that you detest.
Suppose there is a sanctuary where you can take off that coat. Where you yourself, with your own hands, can create a different vehicle out of images and colors, shapes and symbols—but according to different rules. Here, things can be true at the same time. Here, there is no fixed definition of what is real or unreal. Beautiful or ugly. Normal or abnormal. Virtuous or evil. Nonsensical or profound. Masculine or feminine. Serious or ironic.
Here, then, you can embrace the pink and bear witness to injustice. Here, you can play a clever game with the viewer’s perception and, by chance, make brilliant discoveries. Here, you can create something that is lyrical and satirical, playful and profoundly serious, worldly-wise and uninhibited. Vera Gulikers’ work is such a sanctuary: a place where she says yes to what her eyes, her memory, her hands, her intuition, and her knowledge deem possible and true. How lucky we are to be welcome there!
Dirk van Weelden 2023 (translated from Dutch)