KOLLECTION KITSCH #1

What was on display at Kollection Kitsch #1
The first edition of Kollection Kitsch was curated under the theme of Too Fem For Art. The show looked to present a feeling of a sweet and sour candy box: with the eye candy involving politics, empowerment and gender exploration.

The aim was for #Wunderbar visitors to take in Kollection Kitsch’s colourful displays while drinking with their buddies. The credo? “Treat yourself with some quality time: friends+art+food+drinks+love+kitsch= feel good.”

Aubane Berthommé Martinez (France) is a Rotterdam-based proletarian artist, curator, and a million other things. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses various mediums (mainly photography and painting) to explore, question, and re-construct elements defining power dynamics and one’s identity with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her visual aesthetics combine pop culture, poetry, kitsch and extravagance. www.aubanebm.com  Instagram: @aubane.bm

Iris Lam (Netherlands) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, known for her colourful, humorous and provocative drawings, animations and writings, recognised by a “signature” face. Her main aim is to start an open dialogue on large, but delicate topics like female sexuality, sex work, hygiene (or the lack of it), climate justice, anxiety and death. www.irislam.nl Instagram: @iri_slam

Kate Rebecca Price (Australia) is a visual artist, currently based in Rotterdam. Her practice is often interested in the ways that individuals engage within their environments, and how they pursue these manoeuvres singularly, and collectively. Presently (in 2022) she is researching how gardening can be used as a means to facilitate moments of exchange, care-giving, and relationship fostering. Moving between different materialities, her works tend to form through both collecting and reflecting, gleaning pieces from the gardens she visits and translating these through means such as painting, installation building and ceramics. www.kate-price.com  Instagram: @kate_rebecca_price

Kyra Nijskens (Netherlands) is a Rotterdam-based artist whose vivid works engage with reality through a preferred lens of girlish innocence, exploring themes as crafts and decoration as well as the gender issues these aesthetic impulses reflect on. Painting lies at the core of her practice, as she is researching the everchanging image, relating traditional painting to the thousands of images that pass by everyday on our screens, as well as celebrating paintings’ material intentionalities, resulting in a dazzling mixture of techniques, flashy colours and shiny materials. Instagram: @kyranijskenz  www.kyranijskens.com 

Elma Čavčić (Bosnia) works show various elements related to topics of war, political power and her “false brilliance”, such as weapons, soldiers, planes and flags. If you observe long enough, you will notice contradictions in the work, the playfulness of colours versus these war elements. By doing so, she gives the viewer more space to ask questions rather than in just imposing just a serious topic. The starting point of her work are the stories of her parents, which she translated into paintings and ceramic sculptures. www.elmacavcic.nl Instagram: @Elma.cavcic

Linda Stretton is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Rotterdam. Within her practice, she likes to create a world of fantasy and whimsy. Her style is playful, magical and darkly romantic as she is inspired by nature, beauty and the divine feminine. Her work involves a wide range of media; from drawing and painting, to creating costumes, to building up large-scale installations. Instagram: @reallifehumanbean