Jake Caleb (1990, UK) is a Rotterdam based artist. Caleb uses an interdisciplinary approach that brings together strands from visual art, music and poetry. His practice examines the concept of listening and the public and private forms this takes. He formalises his research through exhibition making, hosting events and organising initiatives. These works are often made collectively or in collaboration with others.
Caleb co-runs an other world, a project space for observation, experimentation and dialogue in Rotterdam Zuid. Since 2020 he has cooked with Eathouse, a collective that instigates dialogue on how the culinary informs the social. In 2019 he co-initiated the Singing Club of Rotterdam, an anti-choir that explores how we use the voice.
A passage (2023) with Merve Kılıçer, Tilly Shiner, Michael Lewis and Nael Quraishi - A passage is a body of work investigating the suppression of certain narratives within society, especially those pertaining to migration and grief. The work follows a ‘pilgrimage’ the artist made in 2023 to Allahabad, India to trace the history of his ancestor John James Caleb, a priest of Indian descent. This journey was sparked by the death of the artist’s father Nicholas Caleb due to Covid-19 in 2021. The exhibition at an other world consisted of an installation featuring 35mm black and white photographs taken during his travel to India together with photographs he took in the UK prior to his father’s death. Accompanying the installation Caleb invited Merve Kılıçer (TR), Tilly Shiner (UK), Michael Lewis (ID/NL/IN/UK) and Nael Quraishi (UK/ PK) to share their own (family) histories of migration and assimilation through commissioning original sound pieces and playlists. The contributions of Kılıçer, Shiner and Lewis were shared in two listening sessions on the opening and closing weekend. During the course of the exhibition, Quraishi was in residence at an other world to produce site specific photo-collages. The work intended to bring these private histories of grief and loss caused through assimilation into a public sphere, where space and time could be created to address not only personal experience but a societal lack of public environments where these experiences can be discussed.
The contributions to this exhibition were supported by CBK Rotterdam, a-n Artist Bursaries and Gemeente Rotterdam. Photo developing courtesy of Peach Black.
A passage (2023) - Excerpt of sound piece from the exhibition A passage (2023). Photo Nick Thomas.
Eathouse: Tongue Twisting Dinners – Session 3: reclamation of growth, attention to decay (2023) - Tongue Twisting Dinners was a series of four monthly dinners hosted by Eathouse (Vlada Predelina, Ulufer Çelik, Merve Kılıçer and Jake Caleb). They explored ways of initiating critical dialogue around contemporary urgencies by bringing people and culinary practice together. For each session Eathouse hosted a different topic elaborated by guests whose research guided the dialogue. The dinners tried out unconventional formats that attempted to dissolve the separation between host, guest and audience through inclusive prompts. Each session was followed by a mailout written as an interpretive document of the dinner to be used as a guide to the discussion throughout the series.
The conversation during the third Tongue Twisting Dinner focused on gardening and composting on an urban scale as methodologies for living through ecological crises. We invited guests Four Siblings (Müge Yılmaz & Marija Šujica) to talk about their edible living labyrinth in Amsterdam Nieuw West and Kate Price & Guillem S. Arquer, who discussed their recent research into communities within Rotterdam engaged in making compost.
Tongue Twisting Dinners was supported by Gemeente Rotterdam and CBK Rotterdam. Photo Sophie Bates.
an other world: Traversals – Modernism without Modernity | Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas with Hedvig Koertz, Juliette Mirabito & Kent Chan (2023) - Traversals was a three part residency and exhibition series at an other world that explored the theme of liminal spaces with a selection of invited artists from abroad. The term liminal can refer to occupying either side of a threshold or boundary. The works of invited artists, Vangjush Vellahu, Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas and Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė & Jonas Vaitiekūnas questioned how to inhabit liminality as a place of in-betweens, contingencies, and uncertainty.
For the second part of the series, Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas presented Modernism Without Modernity, an equal parts research, curatorial, and production based project. Modernity can be broadly understood as the “western project of civilisation”. It has long been concerned with the reproduction of the productive body, atomisation, and the creation of a consumerist society. Therefore, the project is born out of a need for alternative modes of being which exist in the paradigm of modernism without embodying modernity.
an other world is a project space for experimentation, dialogue and observation run by Jake Caleb, Ari David and Hedvig Koertz located in Carnisse, Rotterdam. Since its outset, the space’s vision has been to facilitate experimentation, initiate discourse, and enable local and international artists to present their work and research to a wider public. an other world programmes projects that value artistic process as equally as finished outcome, encouraging artists to develop their work within the space through peer feedback and dialogue with the public. an other world values art for its ability to create a meeting place for community making.
Traversals was supported by Gemeente Rotterdam
Atelier van Zuid (2022) with Neva Erik, Hila Kot, Kunley Silvania and Noa Sitton - With Atelier van Zuid, Jake Caleb presents a series of photographs and clothing made alongside Neva Erik, Hila Kot, Kunley Silvania & Noa Sitton. The group answered an ad postered by Caleb on public transport and transit stops in Charlois, Rotterdam. The ad looked for young people from the area who were interested in making their own clothing line. Envied but often unheard, the work came from a curiosity in the attitudes of a younger generation and how these manifest within their mode of dress. The artist wondered what sort of style – and the sense of community that comes with it – they would cultivate if given the chance. How would it conform to trend or differ from a prior generation's ideals?
Following this interest and the subsequent callout, the group met to create a clothing line under the name Atelier van Zuid for Spring Summer 2022. Made out of secondhand clothing collected from family and friends, this became an immediate way to experiment with garment design and technique. It was also a test bed for how the group could run their own label. The finished clothes were then documented through a series of photoshoots both modelled and photographed by the group and their friends.
The exhibition presents the photographs and clothing, documenting the process of their production and the formation and dynamics of the group itself.
Atelier van Zuid has been generously supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Gemeente Rotterdam and CBK Rotterdam.
Garlic Behaviour (2021) - 58m46s audio and installation. Garlic Behaviour is a durational work composed of processed field recordings, text and discarded furniture. The work grew out of a group started during the initial wave of the pandemic. Consisting of geographically distant members spanning several time zones, the group shared daily sound recordings with each other which culminated in individually edited sound works. Shared at a listening session each week, the group’s activities became a way of sampling and processing the sudden disorientating and disconcerting social conditions they found themselves collectively subjected to. The work was developed in locked-down space, where time is felt to simultaneously move while on hold. It asks whether it is possible to occupy this space, a newly felt present between time zones, where conditioned perceptions of time and progress are rearranged and augmented. What is heard in this interstice? What music resonates here? What becomes recon- figured in this accumulation of hours that is also no time at all?
with thanks Bergur Thomas Anderson, Emma Astner, Nathan Bather, Liesbeth Bik, Linus Bonduelle, Annabelle Binnerts, Mylan Hoezen, Natanya Mark, Vlada Predelina, Rachel Schenberg, Daphne Simons, Edward Simpson, Berglind Erna Tryggvadóttir. Garlic Behaviour was exhibited as part of Material Context: PZI Graduation & Alumni Exhibition at Het Archief, Rotterdam from 1st – 11th July 2021.
Supporting Stones (2021) - 16mm digital conversion and installation (10min loop). Supporting Stones (2021) is a sensory mediation on shared time, sites of congregation and myth. Part travelogue, part nature documentary, the film visits sites of Neolithic megaliths known locally as hunebedden in the northern Dutch province of Drenthe. Constructed with boulders left behind by retreating Ice Age glaciers, the structures are archeological remains of the oldest documented farming communities in the area. Predecessors to current sedentary lifestyles, the Neolithic farmers are the film’s long gone protagonists, whose decisions to cultivate the land altered its ecology as they moved away from prior nomadic forms of living. The film attempts to trace these histories of sedentism by visiting these originary sites. Through close observation of the current uses of the landscape, the film asks what forms of life congregate here, what passages of time are present and what grows, both physically and mythically, on these fields’ disturbed edges. The film was made in dialogue with Marta Hryniuk, Nick Thomas and Vlada Predelina and kindly supported by Filmwerk- plaats Rotterdam and the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. With thanks, Emma Astner, Ulufer Çelik, Merve Kılıçer, Clara J:son Borg, Manon Verkooyen, De Witte Buizerd and Hinkman and the garden of Hr. Hinkman.
It was exhibited as part of ‘How to Get From Space to Place’, WET Space, Rotterdam. Photo courtesy Studio Wolphi.
Sketch for Summer (2020) w/ Merve Kılıçer – 9min, 16mm digital conversion (Excerpt above) - With Sketch for Summer (2020), Merve Kılıçer and Jake Caleb continue their practice of searching for specific plants in their surroundings. In this film they searched for plants high in phenol, a chemical substance that can be used to develop film. Intending to use the plants to process the film, they found themselves instead discussing their own process of collaboration. Their casual conversation slowly unfolds over the looping imagery of plants being picked in a garden. The commentary alongside the rough and grainy shots, attempts to sketch out their intentions, reflecting how dialogue is an integral part of their working process. As the film progresses, their initial thoughts become clearer, able to be identified like the plants in the garden the longer time is spent with them. The film was commissioned as part of at7's program and residency at Hotel Maria Kapel, 'To that special someone part II' and made with the support of Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam.
CLUB NIGHT: Singing Club of Rotterdam / Audience at Antenne (2019/2020) - Recorded during their debut Club Night in December 2019, Singing Club of Rotterdam / Audience at Antenne captures the sounds and energy of 40 people singing in a bedroom sized venue. For the event, the club shared warmups and exercises developed on the theme: how not to give a fuck. The audience were asked to participate, with the only tools required being their voices and their bodies. Exercises included 'Rotterdam Sound', a 20 minute aural mapping of Rotterdam through mimicry and improvisation and 'Collective Memory Song', where pop hits were collectively remembered and sang from memory. The event aimed to unearth the sounds that form and inform a social body and explore the production of communal joy. The recordings were released digitally and on limited tape cassette on the Antenne label in September 2020. Singing Club of Rotterdam is an experimental anti-choir initiated by Jake Caleb & Bergur Thomas Anderson in early 2019. Clubbers meet every other week to explore what can be done with the voice. This activity is member led, with a wavy amount of participants circulating around a ~15 person core. The Singing Club has done two public events so far, at Antenne and Attent in Rotterdam, where members organise the program to share with a wider public. For every semester it chooses a theme to focus on from an ever growing manifesto; previously the club has explored how not to give a fuck and listening to all our voices. Photo courtesy Antenne.
Ik zie, ik zie, wat jij niet ziet! (2020) - In the bulldozed grounds of the redevelopment site plants have taken root. Wildflowers and perennials emerge where houses stood. People no longer live here yet weeds continue to grow. To observe this life growing in the uninhabitable, a field study was initiated. In pairs, participants of the field study searched and identified weeds. One participant would describe a plant to another who would draw solely from their description. In this act of translation, space for wild interpretation was created and grew on the page. An arrangement of the drawings was displayed inside the glasshouse, bringing the study of the redevelopment site into the exhibition space. The same technique of drawing from description organically sprawled across its windows. These wild-flowers grew within the glasshouse. Is there space for weeds and wildflowers to grow in Rotterdam? Is there space for wild thought to enter the collective imaginary? Can this provoke the question what and who is allowed to live and grow in the city? With thanks Rozemarijn de Booij, Collette Rayner, Runa Ong, Floor Snels, Marijke Klamer, Kelsey, Nathan Bastien, Effy Fu, Mylan Hoezen, Wojtek Szustak, Carmen José, Wilma Kun, Kamiel Verschuren Supported through CBK Rotterdam, Stichting NAC and Charlois Speciaal. Manon Verkooyen (NL) is an artist and writer based in Rotterdam. She graduated from AKV St Joost in 2017.
