RESET (VIENNA 1909, 20-YEAR-OLD ADOLF HITLER IS HOMELESS), CRATED VERSION

Roy Villevoye

In the shifting geopolitical landscape of 2024, this work – made by Roy Villevoye in 2016 for the Hacking Habitatexhibition curated by Ine Gevers – has gained new significance. The artist’s original interest was in the many twists and turns life took for the young Adolf Hitler around 1909. Reset is a kind of time machine.

At DEAL WITH IT we are presenting Reset, Crated Version, in which Hitler has yet to be unpacked. In the current climate, with extreme right-wing governments in Finland, Hungary and Italy and the victory of Wilders’ PVV in the Netherlands, the title Reset has gained a very different connotation. Not Hitler himself, but countless other potential Hitlers may get a platform and become leaders of European nations.

Roy Villevoye

― Kunstenaar

Roy Villevoye (1960, Maastricht) studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, where he also currently works as an advisor. In the late 1980s he was assistant to Sol LeWitt. After a succesful career as a painter in that period, he started following a new artistic course. Especially since 1992 when he began to travel frequently outside Europe, mostly to Papua, the former Dutch New Guinea. From then on his regular stays with the Asmat people inspired him to create a variety of works – first paintings, gradually also photographs and works in other media – about colour, cultural codification and identity. His work has gradually developed as a testimony of -sometimes uncomfortable- encounters and dialogue between two asynchronous cultures, beyond the simplified scheme of progress, the primitive and the mythical and the conventional assessment of values and manners. It reflects the interdependence and complexity of these interactions. This is also a motive in a number of the films he has been making since 1998, often in collaboration with Jan Dietvorst. He works in Amsterdam.

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