Rotterdam is changing. New construction projects spring up everywhere and Rotterdam’s nasty edges are cleaned up. Change is also noticeable in Rotterdam’s most remote district, Hoek van Holland. In September 2019, a Rotterdam metro line to what the municipality refers to as Rotterdam Beach was opened. The photographer Peter de Krom (1981) grew up in ‘the Hoek’ and returned to his village between 2010 and 2015 to shoot a number of free photographic series. The Kunsthal is presenting five of these series, each of them an autonomous visual story.
Sanne Sannes (1937-1967) is known for his erotic photographic portraits. His subjects for these were exclusively women; he was obsessed with their erotic power. During his short career as a photographer he recorded intimate moments, close to the skin, in coarse-grained black and white.
For centuries, Ovid’s inventive and playfully written stories have been a source of inspiration to visual artists, composers and writers. Maria van Donkelaar (Rotterdam, 1947) rewrote 23 stories from the Metamorphoses into light-hearted flowing verses. Sylvia Weve (Utrecht, 1958) created expressive, surrealistic and humorous illustrations to accompany the stories. (…) The exhibition ‘Metamorphoses, 2000 years after Ovid’, contains eight stories and shows how Ovid’s universal themes carry through to the present and make his work relevant to this very day.