Opening and talk: Thursday, 29 October, 18:30 - 20:00
The artist Casper Faassen is present.
Guest speaker: Dr. Michaela Oberhofer, Curator of African and Oceanic Art & Deputy Head of Curatorial Affairs, Museum Rietberg
ReCollection forms the second chapter of Bildhalle's two-part presentation of Casper Faassen. The longstanding project grew out of the artist's profound interest in collecting, memory and the value we assign to objects.
Through a process Faassen calls “ReCollecting”, he traces dispersed cultural objects and reimagines them through his distinctive visual language, examining how Western museum collections have been formed and how cultural authority has been historically constructed.
While the colonial history of Faassen’s native Netherlands forms an important point of reference, ReCollection continually evolves in response to the places in which it is presented. Faassen researches local collections and histories, creating connections that bring wider questions of collecting, ownership and restitution into a specific context. In Switzerland, his research has encompassed institutions, collections and freeports, from a stolen Modigliani concealed in a Geneva freeport to looted paintings and smuggled antiquities.
Through Faassen’s characteristic layering, the objects acquire an almost tangible presence, their contours rendered slightly indistinct. They seem simultaneously present and inaccessible; tantalisingly out of reach. Presented in crates that evoke the transport and trade of cultural goods, the resulting works become sculptural “memories in transit”, grouped according to shared histories of displacement, contested ownership or restitution.
For Casper Faassen, restitution is not the conclusion of an object’s history, but the beginning of a broader conversation about historical injustice and contemporary inequality. Each recollected object occupies its own place within this ongoing dialogue, while others shaped by artistic admiration and centuries of exchange remind us that cultural interconnectedness long predates the borders we have since imposed.
