Projection between exhibition and information: experimental and artists' film at 'Sonsbeek 71'

Originally an outdoor sculpture exhibition in the Dutch town of Arnhem, the 1971 edition of Sonsbeek was curated in a spirit of rupture. Not only was Sonsbeek 71 conceived as breaking away from the conventional format of an open-air sculpture show by bringing together sculpture with land art, conceptual art, and artists’ moving images, but it also literally went ‘beyond the pale’ (or buiten de perken in Dutch), as its subtitle had it. And as the exhibition’s curator, Wim Beeren, put it even more bombastically, Sonsbeek 71 was to take ‘the entire country as field of operation’ (Beeren 1971, 11). In addition to works scattered across Holland, Beeren’s vision conceived of the country less as a geophysical landscape than as a network of cities and sites interconnected through telecommunication media. Also, as part of this radical reconfiguration of the exhibition apparatus as a whole, the inclusion of experimental film works by way of specifically designed projection and viewing infrastructures lay at a critical junction in Beeren’s project. On the one hand, his ambition to transgress the limits of the exhibition led him to operate on the whole land and conceive it as the (exhibition) medium itself, while, on the other, by redefining the latter altogether, that very concept was to become obsolete through its replacement by the curator’s emphasis on the concept of ‘activity’.