INTRODUCTION

after his contributions intimate self portrait, real space/real time and raga subha, toine horvers appears on stage ocw for the fourth time, this time with his solo programme draaien/rotating: an exhibition of ten autonomous time-spatial sculptures, based on objective observations and circular movements. _draaien/rotating features texts, live spoken by toine while he is turning around the center point of a circle formed by the audience.

rotation 1, 2 and 3 is a series of recent vocal works, dealing with movement. _turning 1, day 1, ringwave 1 and ringwave 3 are descriptions of older works based on circular movements, pronounced while turning. _turning 3 is merely movement

toine started rotating round a center point, after he got acqainted with members of the sufi-movement in istanbul. _he got interested in the dance of the derwishes, not for the mystical character of the ritual, but for rotation as an act in space. _his interest in the whirling dance resulted in a number of studies, that toine no longer calls performances but movement-sequences: rotation 1, 2 and 3. _the pronunciation of the consecutive points of compass represents the dynamics of rotation: the words ‘north’, ‘east’, ‘south’ and ‘west’ serve as a condensed form of sound poetry, a vocal power that drives the rotation and generates associations with rituals, cycles, earth and the cosmos.

toine’s art practice has much in common with that of a dancer, a singer or a sound poet. _despite these interdisciplinary border crossings, he considers himself mainly a visual artist. _and even though his work is rooted in conceptual art - that justifies the pure idea as means ánd ends - toine pushed one step further by placing his sculptures as actual physical and acoustic shapes in space. _and even though some of his works are site specific or made for particular occassions, toine wants each of his works to be autonomous, repeatable, and fit to be performed on every location. _as a result of residencies in turkey and india, toine started to reflect on the nature of his work – what is it, and where does it belong? - and started to question the survival of art that can only exist in time and space.

toine owns an extensive collection of pictures and sound recordings, that document the thirtyseven years of his professional practice. _he hardly ever consulted the archive. _its content is inappropriate to recreate the then actual physical experience, or touch the very core of past times and spaces. _this year, toine started to compose a list of all performances and works he made since 1979.  _he started to re-describe then one by one in compact texts. _it forced him to distance himself from his oeuvre, in order to re-invent, and re-create it. _you can consider his descriptions as instructions for re-presentation, as a tolerant mould for the imagination of a potential reader. _tonight’s programme features five of these descriptions: turning 1, day, ringwave 1, language and ring, that last two to three minutes in spoken form.

meanwhile toine noticed that the act of describing became almost as important as performing the work. _in the near future toine hopes to be able to publish his collected descriptions in a book with the title bewegingen (movements). _not as a dry summation of things done, but as a suitable location for a body of new autonomous work, that raises the level of imagination. _’a book that will be finished, when I cannot imagine any possible reader,’ according to the artist. [as]