A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE
(Nederlands beneden)
In the context of FALL: FIVE FAILS – New Works after Bas Jan Ader-
a collaboration of Block C, Pictura, ARTisBOOK, Minerva Academy, SIGN.
SIGN presents:
A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE
19 september – 19 october 2025
Oded Rimon, Danai Belosinof, Adele Dipasquale, Sverre van der Velde
, Bernardo Zanotta
The official opening of FALL: FIVE FAILS will take place on Friday, September 19th, at 3:00 PM at Academy Minerva by Roos Gortzak (director of the Groninger Museum).
Venues open at 4:00 PM.
At SIGN the opening and toast of ‘a case of make believe’ will take place at 5:00 PM with a performance by the Bragi choir on the canal!
Five artists, inspired by Bas Jan Ader’s latest work, have explored how fiction can become a form of truth.
They explore this through installations, performances, video, and audio constellations. There will also be reading and writing sessions, a film night, and a tour for further exploration.
‘A Case Of Make Believe ‘is curated by Bernardo Zanotta (1996 in Porto Alegre, Brazil) visual artist, filmmaker. His short films are rooted in the interplay between the familiar and the fantastical.
Activities in SIGN
-Friday 26 September FILM SCREENING curated by Sverre van der Velde –Start 20:00 hrs .
-Saturday 4 & 11 October, Time: 10:00–15:00 (incl. lunch). Subscribe via signnl@gmail.com
WORKGROUP: The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls – On (Auto)Fiction and Fatality –
Close readings and discussion on narrative and the tension between witnessing and myth-making. We will look at how autofiction can mediate our experience of the world, how storytelling can shape or undo fate, and how this can be incorporated into one’s art practice. Between session 1 and 2, participants are expected to write a short story which will be shared with the group.
A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE
In 2025, we mark the disappearance of Bas Jan Ader fifty years ago. His final project, “In Search of the Miraculous,” saw him embark on a journey across the Atlantic from the United States to Europe in a small boat; a voyage that ended with his disappearance. In the context of this anniversary, the city of Groningen will host a series of events to pay tribute to Bas Jan Ader, showcasing both his historical work and new artistic productions aligned with his recurring themes.
Among these events, at SIGN projectspace , a group of artists have developed new works where the boundaries between fiction and reality, as well as their documentation and reenactment, serve as a starting point. A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE challenges the very notion of these boundaries, proposing that constructed narratives and lived experience are inherently intertwined and perhaps even indistinguishable.
The works in the exhibition call for a different kind of presence. They look toward the miraculous and invite the viewer to play with it, as something folded into the textures of the everyday, staging fictions and parallel narratives. What the artists share is the use of the apparatus: film, theatre, sound and their poetic dimensions. “How can the voice be a technology that allows communication not only across distant geographies but also distant temporalities? Could it challenge our notions of linear time and prescriptive ideas of death?”
What if a window, a gust of wind, a conjuring, a doorway, a closet, a corner, were not just objects, but the memory of something or someone that has just vanished? Magic appears occasionally, unexpectedly. The familiar trick of disappearing inside a coffin. Could we, too, play a trick on death before it plays a trick on us? A ship sinks, again and again, in a room designed to fail. Someone decides to run away. Another chooses to look death in the eye and challenge it. A sand-filled basement hums with the breath of vanishing voices. A trip to the moon and then a return.
In the exhibition, the artists do not necessarily draw inspiration from Bas Jan Ader’s figure, but similarly question how fiction and life are entwined, at times taking the form of a mirror, at others a moment of disruption through the mediums of installation, music, performance, and video.
During the exhibition, a workshop at SIGN organised by Bernardo Zanotta will provide space for dialogue and the creation of a temporary community, extending some of the concerns of the works into shared discussion and reflection.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
ODED RIMON ( Jeruzalem 1992) , VAV Rietveld, Amsterdam 2018. Lived Space / Temporary Domesticity – Spaces like the boat, kitchen, or other temporary homes as sites for storytelling, reflection, or dreaming. https://www.instagram.com/odedyrimon/, https://burostedelijk.nl/collaborators/oded-rimon/
ADELE DIPASQUALE (1994, Italy), KABK Den Haag MA Artistic Research 2020. Dialogue Between Works / Doublings – Works in relation to one another rather than in isolation. Her work is about fake language and embodies voices, fictionalizing mythology and combine it with reality. How to communicatie with distance. https://www.instagram.com/adele_dipasquale/, https://www.adeledipasquale.com/
DANAI BELOSINOF (1993, Greece/Bulgaria), composition Conservatorium, Amsterdam/ contemporary music | Sound / Voice / Spatial Listening – Using sound and voice to inhabit space. Sound as mapping or portal. contemporary music | Danai Belosinof. https://www.instagram.com/danai_bv/
SVERRE VAN DER VELDE (2000, Groningen NL) , 2024 graduated Academy Minerva Groningen - Travel / Journey / Nomadism/ Timelessness – Artworks made in transit or shaped by the act of movement. The road, boat, or vehicle becomes a mobile studio. https://www.instagram.com/sverrevdvelde/. https://sverrevandervelde.com
BERNARDO ZANOTTA (artist-curator) (1996 in Porto Alegre, Brazil) . VAV audio visual 2018 Rietveld, Amsterdam -Fiction as Methodology / Mediumship -Fiction as a generative or conceptual tool. https://www.instagram.com/bernardozanotta/. https://bernardozanotta.com/
ABOUT THE WORKS
Bernardo Zanotta: ‘Above My Father’ (2025) is a fragment, a raw, unprocessed excerpt from a longer feature film I am developing. One that began with the invitation, or perhaps the impossible proposition, to film my father’s death. This short piece stands as the most documentary-like segment of this work that otherwise drifts toward the vampiric, the theatrical, the spectral and melodramatic, echoing the atmosphere of Jean Rollin, but also of many others like Almodovar, Raul Ruiz and what not. For now, in this iteration of the show at Sign, what I can make public is just something very unguarded. I am sharing the process and sharing my grief in a way. What you see is my father building his own coffin, and me, his son, filming it. What I am looking for with this is precisely to give voice to what you call the broken cycle; the failure of closure: no reappearance after the vanishing, no curtain call. It’s just an awkward “double exposure” indeed for now.
Tin Cry (2025) by Adele Dipasquale is an audiovisual incantation. Shot in Clermont-Ferrand during a residency, the work is steeped in a landscape full of myth, history, geology and subterranean architecture. The magic emerges through the medium itself: 16mm film, already a kind of enchanted surface, grainy, tactile. A medium that captures atmospheres. It is in the stillness, in the half-seen gestures and subtle performances that unfold within the frame that the work aligns itself with a lineage of artists like Maya Deren or even Bas Jan Ader alike, where the body becomes medium, conjuring cinema through a near anti-spectacle, one made of small, precise intensities. It is the fragile magic of something barely there, and therefore all the more real.
In The Fountain (2025) by Oded Rimon, what we see is a set. A constructed scene. A slice of a ship (kitchen, corner, stairwell, door) cut open and left to flood. Water gushes from all sides. Maybe it seeps from the walls, drips from somewhere behind a closet. The space is domestic, familiar, and entirely unstable. There’s no one inside. No figure to orient us. Just furniture, compartments, the wreckage of a routine. The person is missing, or perhaps was never there. What remains is an impression. A layout. It is always ending or always beginning. I think for me, it is tempting to imagine a story. A life interrupted… But the work denies resolution. It stays in this in-between: between use and ruin, presence and exit; a kind of a forged memory.
‘There’s always something between the cracks’ (2025) is an installation by Danai Belosinof, whose background is in musical composition. She was invited this time to create something spatial, and what emerged is a kind of an acoustic terrain, an architecture of listening. The work unfolds across several speakers dispersed throughout the room, forming an organized cacophony; a choreography of sounds. The sound begins before the body arrives. It calls the viewer (listener) towards it. At moments, it feels like stepping inside the imagined interior of a wall, where sound molecules live and scatter. Once again, there is the after-image of a story: fragments of language and noise that hint at time, decay. One might think of homes overtaken, of sand drafting something new from ancient remains.
‘Everything has changed but the feeling is the same‘ (2025) is an ongoing video work by Sverre van der Velde, developed for SIGN. In it, the artist turns his lens inward and outward by exploring the act of running away. Picking up from their previous work everything is the same but the feeling has changed, which investigated feelings of alienation and emotional distance tied to specific physical surroundings, this new piece shifts into the ambiguity that follows a departure. Composed as a kind of video diary, the work draws from Sverre’s travels across Europe. It shows fragments of landscape, movement, and in-between spaces. Themes in the work evoke loss, disconnection, and the difficult privilege of voluntary escape. What does it mean to run away when one has the safety to do so? Can one really leave a feeling behind, or does it simply reshape itself in new geographies?
Nederlands
In de context van FALL: FIVE FAILS – Nieuw werk naar Bas Jan Ader - een samenwerking tussen Block C, Pictura, ARTisBOOK, Minerva Academie, SIGN.
SIGN presenteert:
A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE
19 september – 19 october 2025
Oded Rimon, Danai Belosinof, Adele Dipasquale, Sverre van der Velde
, Bernardo Zanotta
Officiële opening FALL: FIVE FAILS vrijdag 19 september vanaf 15 uur in Minerva door Roos Gortzak (directeur Groninger Museum). Locaties open vanaf 16.00 uur. Opening & toast in SIGN om 17.00 uur met een optreden van het Bragi koor op het kanaal !
Vijf kunstenaars hebben, naar aanleiding van het laatste werk van Bas Jan Ader, de vraag gesteld hoe fictie een vorm van waarheid kan worden.
Dit verbeelden zij in installaties, performances, video- en geluid opstellingen. Ook zijn er lees- en schrijfsessies, een filmavond en een tour voor meer verdieping.
’A Case Of Make Believe’ is gecureerd door Bernardo Zanotta (1996 in Porto Alegre, Brazil) beeldend kunstenaar, filmmaker. Zijn korte films zijn geworteld in de wisselwerking tussen het bekende en het fantastische.
Activiteiten:
-Vrijdag 26 september FILM PROGRAMMA door Sverre van der Velde – Start 20:00 uur
– Zaterdag 4 & 11 oktober, 10:00–15:00 (incl. lunch). Voertaal: Engels. Opgave: signnl@gmail.com. WERKGROEP: De jongen die over de Niagarawaterval viel – Over (auto)fictie en fataliteit – Close readings en discussie over narratief en de spanning tussen getuigen en mythevorming. We bekijken hoe autofictie onze ervaring van de wereld kan bemiddelen, hoe storytelling het lot kan vormen of ongedaan kan maken, en hoe dit kan worden geïntegreerd in iemands kunstpraktijk. Tussen sessie 1 en 2 wordt van de deelnemers verwacht dat ze een kort verhaal schrijven dat met de groep wordt gedeeld.
A CASE OF MAKE BELIEVE
In 2025 herdenken we de verdwijning van Bas Jan Ader vijftig jaar geleden. Zijn laatste project, “In Search of the Miraculous”, bracht hem ertoe om in een kleine boot de Atlantische Oceaan over te steken van de Verenigde Staten naar Europa; een reis die eindigde met zijn verdwijning. In het kader van deze herdenking organiseert de stad Groningen een reeks evenementen ter ere van Bas Jan Ader, waarbij zowel zijn historische werk als nieuwe artistieke producties worden gepresenteerd die aansluiten bij zijn terugkerende thema’s.
Een van deze evenementen, in SIGN projectspace, is een groep kunstenaars die nieuw werk heeft ontwikkeld waarbij de grenzen tussen fictie en realiteit, evenals de documentatie en re-enactment ervan, als uitgangspunt dienen. A Case of Make Believe daagt het idee van deze grenzen uit en stelt dat geconstrueerde verhalen en beleefde ervaringen inherent met elkaar verweven zijn en misschien zelfs niet van elkaar te onderscheiden.
De werken in de tentoonstelling vragen om een ander soort aanwezigheid. Ze kijken naar het wonderbaarlijke en nodigen de toeschouwer uit ermee te spelen, als iets dat verweven is met de texturen van het alledaagse, en dat ficties en parallelle verhalen ensceneert. Wat de kunstenaars gemeen hebben, is het gebruik van het apparaat: film, theater, geluid en hun poëtische dimensies. “Hoe kan de stem een technologie zijn die communicatie mogelijk maakt, niet alleen over verre geografieën, maar ook over verre temporaliteiten? Zou het onze noties van lineaire tijd en prescriptieve ideeën over de dood kunnen uitdagen?”
Wat als een raam, een windvlaag, een bezwering, een deuropening, een kast, een hoek niet zomaar objecten waren, maar de herinnering aan iets of iemand die zojuist is verdwenen? Magie verschijnt af en toe, onverwacht. De bekende truc van het verdwijnen in een doodskist. Zouden ook wij de dood kunnen bedriegen voordat hij ons bedriegt? Een schip zinkt, keer op keer, in een kamer die ontworpen is om te mislukken. Iemand besluit weg te rennen. Een ander kiest ervoor de dood in de ogen te kijken en hem uit te dagen. Een met zand gevulde kelder gonst van de adem van verdwijnende stemmen. Een reis naar de maan en dan een terugkeer.
In de tentoonstelling laten de kunstenaars zich niet per se inspireren door de figuur van Bas Jan Ader, maar bevragen ze evenzeer hoe fictie en leven met elkaar verweven zijn. Soms nemen ze de vorm aan van een spiegel, dan weer van een moment van ontwrichting via de media installatie, muziek, performance en video.
Tijdens de tentoonstelling biedt een workshop bij SIGN, georganiseerd door Bernardo Zanotta, ruimte voor dialoog en de creatie van een tijdelijke gemeenschap, waarbij enkele van de thema’s van de werken worden uitgebreid tot gedeelde discussie en reflectie.