Writing & Editing - Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Welcome Stranger started more than 25 years ago as a series of exhibitions in a private home, initiated by Marjolein Schaap and Ken Zeph. The event served as a comment on the official art circuit - not out of recalcitrance or idealism - but as a way of reflection. Instead of a predetermined subject, motto or motif, the focus was simply on the data that emerged naturally from the situation; the location, a house in the city, and related to that the interaction between the private room and the public space, openness and privacy. Each time 4 artists were invited to respond to this fact and to each other.From this background, Welcome Stranger is currently exploring opportunities to create new encounters between art and public. In the living environment, experiences of tradition and culture are brought to the fore; one can easily recognize the own and the strange. Welcome Stranger wants to give space to the dialogue between artists and offer them the opportunity to show work in unusual places.Welcome Stranger has been dormant for a long time and has been given a new impulse since 2017 by Hester Elzerman and Marianna van der Zwaag.