COURTPLAY

The first volume published by Amsterdam-based Hartwig Art Foundation, COURTPLAY constitutes the book counterpart to the eponymous event conceived by Mohamed Almusibli and Ivan Cheng, and presented in January 2024 at the former courthouse of Amsterdam, the location of the foundation’s forthcoming museum. With its manifold program comprised of film screenings, site-specific installations, and a 24-hour three-act play entitled ALIAS (Turbo Moniker), COURTPLAY is representative of the multidisciplinary and innovative approach to contemporary creation promoted by Hartwig Art Foundation and was commissioned by the foundation’s director Beatrix Ruf.

Centered on ALIAS (Turbo Moniker), this book offers the entire script of the play which was sequenced and staged by Ivan Cheng in three acts (“City/Mind,” “Celebrities,” “Body/State”) from the contributions proposed by an international array of creative writers, artists, and art professionals. Drawing on the former Amsterdam courthouse in which the event took place, the play combines language, gestures, stories, and topics from the legal world and the participants’ idiosyncratic universes to create a TV legal drama like no other. The traditional genre of the debate or disputatio is revived through a reconsideration of the established notions of law and tradition, and allows contemporary issues such as the difference between audience, consumer, and witness, or our evolving relationship with time and our experience of it, to be raised. COURTPLAY ran over the course of an evening and a day in a specific location, but its diverse content speaks to manifold continuities and affiliations, offering a subjective mirror to many relevant topics today through the multiplicity of its voices.

Edited and introduced by Kunsthalle Basel Director Mohamed Almusibli and Amsterdam-based artist, performer, and writer Ivan Cheng, this publication brings together texts and contributions by Sophia Al-Maria, Josefin Arnell, Ed Atkins, Felix Bernstein, Victoria Colmegna, Claire Fontaine, Robert Glück & Jocelyn Saidenberg, Annie Goodner, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Shiv Kotecha, Huw Lemmey, Nour Mobarak, Becket MWN, Ariana Reines, Tai Shani, Ryan Trecartin, and Angharad Williams, as well as illustrations by court illustrator Aloys Oosterwijk. It also includes a postface by Beatrix Ruf, director of Hartwig Art Foundation.

Published with Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam.