Performing Silence: Antonis Pittas and Sarah van Sonsbeeck

Performing Silence presents the work of two upcoming artists: Antonis Pittas and Sarah van Sonsbeeck. Both Pittas and Van Sonsbeeck create large-scale installations and sculptural objects that investigate the performative aspects of spatiality and spatial experience. While Van Sonsbeeck explores sound, sound pollution and the resulting desire for silence, Pittas is mainly interested in the ‘calm after a storm’ – the moment of quiet shock after a conflict has ended or is temporarily put on hold. Pittas’s installation at De Nederlandsche Bank explores the state of public space after the recent upheavals in Istanbul and Cairo. In Van Sonsbeeck’s work, the question whether it is possible to maintain a sense of ‘privacy’ against the totalitarian public ‘noise’ is a pressing issue. Self-preservation, self-protection and the fragility of human life are recurring themes in both their oeuvres. The works presented at De Nederlandsche Bank each freeze and monumentalise those fleeting moments in which transformation occurs, exposing the forces at work in what we call ‘the public sphere’. In this respect, Performing Silence can also be seen as an attempt at re-appropriation.