→ Gerrit Rietveld Academie: Graduation Show 2023 (Amsterdam, NL)
Ducks in a Pond.
In “Ducks in a Pond”, Alexander Kinzig presents the outcomes of his curiosity in a theatrical-looking office space. The filing cabinet takes up a prominent spot, along with a couple of other office classics that furnish his spot at the graduation show. A couple of desktop computers and three large wooden panels, the size of a whiteboard or flipchart. The filled-in questionnaires are in the drawers of the cabinet where they’ve always been, and someone just finished sharpening some pencils. Now that the results of the questionnaires are in they can be read on the panels. The factual information looks neatly arranged on one, but distrubuted, more scattered in a more legibly challenging configuration on the next. Another typographic and third diagram reminds of Eighties sports brand logo, with the text-based specs going up and down in a combination of razor-sharp angles.
Barcodes adorning elements on the panels and in the installation can be hand scanned with barcode scanners revealing the answers on screen, where a spinning pencil reminiscent of the Windows Office assistant Clippy entertains you while you wait. The unexpected protagonist in the work is a duck, made by lines connecting the dots on one of the more readable panels. Here, the duck’s a prankster, an absurd presence to make clear we are witnessing an artwork, and that we’re not in an office cubicle.
The participatory aspects of the piece entertain the viewer, and add a sense of performance to the work. The staged surroundings activate the users to become curious about a group’s behaviour and peculiarities. Kinzig’s question-based research provides insights into the lives of his peers and that of himself, and it comes to no surprise that a target audience of art students will wildly customise questionnaires like these and will provide you with answers that aren’t anything like the standard optional answer A., B., or C.
Together with Uma Naddermier and Liza Borovikova, Alexander Kinzig designed a graduation yearbook inspired by the methods behind his data gathering endeavour: a sixteen paged paper handout to accompany the visit at the end of the year show at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie 2023.