What Touches, Stays – Notes on Hapticity at Nieuwe Vide
For Elena Kostenko, Hannah Dawn Henderson and Kees van Leeuwen, their shared name: Notes on Hapticity, is taken from the title of their first collaborative project. Their activities as a collective were catalysed by the onset of the pandemic and its impact on spatiality, social relations, and haptic modes of interacting. Now, after a few more years, they present a first collective show. Anastasia Shin wonders what defines this collective practice.
Like a band, artist collectives arrive at their shared moniker in different and peculiar ways. A name is perhaps their first shared idea: an umbrella term, a call to purpose, a connotation-based word, or simply a double-barrelling. For Elena Kostenko, Hannah Dawn Henderson and Kees van Leeuwen, their shared name: Notes on Hapticity, is taken from the title of their first collaborative project. A title they held onto even as the form of their first public presentation changed from a physical show to an online event. Their activities as a collective were catalysed by the onset of the pandemic and its impact on spatiality, social relations, and haptic modes of interacting.
‘The red thread of this show is “dwelling”,’ says Hannah Dawn Henderson, one third of the artist collective Notes on Hapticity who are currently showing their work at Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem. Dwelling, like hapticity, implies an embodied experience that can also be refracted through a metaphorical lens. To dwell is to inhabit, but also to stay with something. The haptic, derived from the Greek haptikos, meaning to grasp, is a tactile, perceptive mode. From the outset, both material and conceptual cues linger: not so much as guides to the artists’ thinking and making processes, but as references hovering nearby, serving as anchors for the viewer.
In the exhibition, a large bunker-grey wall cuts a slice across the entrance, initiating the viewer into a sculptural grammar that disorients and contains. This division of space engulfs you in a mini maze for a few 90 degree turns before opening out towards two red pull-down chairs with a border control vibe. All works in the show have some kind of seat or chair integrated into their installation. These first two seem deliberately liminal in concept, while the others foster unrushed engagement and general accessibility. Footnotes accompany this initial work by Kees van Leeuwen. The individual artists seem to want the work to be approached within their own contexts. The titles are tight; a lot is explained, aligning with the working ethos of Nieuwe Vide, fostering engagement and accessibility with wider publics. But this abundance of context makes it quite hard to find your own way in.
I’m pulled between a contextual collective frame and the internal logics of separate works. I wonder how, if at all, the collective practice is embedded, as it appears to be a co-curated show. Yet I don’t doubt the importance of the individual details: the artists’ frames of reference are not something for others to casually discard. They are valid lived experiences, generously shared. And this is all the more important when the frame is not an accommodated-for-norm, or an aspect of personal experience like having a mixed heritage or being neurodivergent.
The aspect of collective practice which is underlined in the public talk that Henderson and Kostenko give, is the refinement of values: the willingness to feed-back, work together, support, to be reflective and open, and learn from unexpected encounters. A valiant ethos to aim for, but is the collective aspect of the work apparent in the show? Their publishing practice seems to have its own thread, using graphic design, scores and performance is a format they’ve repeated in print distribution. The pop-up shop they have at Nieuwe Vide showcases some of these printed booklets and cards. In publication form, it seems Notes on Hapticity often extend the invitation to participate to others. In print, authors’ names come in a list. In the exhibition space, the three artists’ individual names cauterise the works from a possible collective endeavor.
Notes on Hapticity have titled their exhibition: Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation. In the show, sculpture, print and film are distinctly contained in different spaces. The haptic sense is in action often at one-remove, with the oscillation between ideas and sensory experience weighted towards framing. Refreshingly, this does lead to nuanced expressions—more than mere tactile representations or ‘haptic visuality’ in the sense of blurry abstraction in moving image (linked to losing one’s distanced and disengaged self) à la Laura Marks’ well-known film theory. Bodily senses are engaged and eyes do function as ‘organs of touch,’ yet we remain aware of the protocols and proprioceptive, controlling character of space.
In Van Leeuwen’s work, this is reflected in historical Cold War references to secret underground spaces. There’s a reflexive performativity to the form of perception required too; areas are both hidden and revealed. In Grounding (2022), one of Elena Kostenko’s films in the screening program, earth is sifted and multiple clay surfaces are pressed, contextualised by her experiences of integration in a new country. The film takes clay forms from abstraction to instrument: once fired and glazed, the petals of clay are installed in the grounds of a French castle where they hang and clang together. Importantly, the materials Kostenko used combine substances sourced from the Netherlands, Russia, China, US and Kazakhstan—countries in which she has lived.
Hannah Dawn Henderson’s interpretation of the archive is non-hegemonic, unlike a drawer or a shelf that you can organise or a room you can lock. It’s the poignancy and messiness of elusive (or un-ignorable) embodied experience, ‘the body as an intergenerational archive’ that keeps the notion of hapticity close here. Her film metrics of a temporary dwelling (2022) captures architectural and anthropological national storage in anonymous-looking rolling archive shelves; and includes cropped images of the people contained within. The figures’ bare body parts shown in close-up, are narrated by four people: in Dutch, English and Baha Indonesian. Within this narration, the empathetic voice who questions the categorisation, consent and forced anonymity of the figures stands out as the artists’ own—while other voices read, she speaks.
In the last room, where a wall-sized painting of Konstenko’s pixel-like clay tiles in the red-orange gradient hues of a nasturtium flower hangs, I feel set at a distance from the palm-pressed, colourful, flattened pieces. From the bench, I’m encouraged to engage with the most directly ‘haptic’ work of the show as an optic, low-resolution image, more Rothko’s chapel than intimate touch.
For these three artists—who are also friends, being in dialogue, working together and building some momentum—led to a form of ‘collective’ they decided to commit to, but this is a commitment that wanes. What does it mean to the longevity of a collective practice to jump in and out of collective sentiments built intermittently over years? Do the paradigms of growth and progress overshadow the critical capacity of the project? Who do you owe it to to continue? When is it time to disband? Like a long distance relationship that might suffer when not tended to—or indeed thrive in the freedom afforded by such a dynamic—the trio attend to their connection and difference with honesty. Built from a clear need in the upheaval of the pandemic, the doubt they share in 2025 makes me question the function of the collective in this form. What necessitates the publicness of this process? Backstage, aren’t all practices in need of the emotional infrastructures they underline; inherently interdependent?
In terms of accessibility, Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation is a generous offering. The norms of institutional ableism permeate exhibition spaces so that we are too used to the absence of accessible forms (audio tour, guidance in different languages, footnotes which invite in un-initiated art viewers). And because of that, they’re harder to ignore.
I agree with the importance of honing the interdependent, social dimensions of a practice. Here though, it sometimes feels like that ethos is leveraged toward exposure, channelled into a brand. Collectivity as a form that gathers hype as it gains members.
The nonlinear aspects of the individual artists’ practices and the embodied, situated knowledges they invoke are strong in all of their works. I’m left questioning why Notes on Hapticity are stealing the scene and narrating above these particularities. I, too, have led you through a linear reading. The top-to-bottom page has that restriction. Space doesn’t. Was this an option for overlap, missed? Or is it simply time to take down the umbrella-term and enjoy the gathering?
The exhibition Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation is on show at Nieuwe Vide until the 13th of April
Anastasia Shin
