This is the speech of Bander van Ierland, at the opening at Gallery Bos Fine Art in Utrecht

on the 7th of October 2023. 

My thanks to Paul and Marianne Bos, the gallery owners, Martin Sjardijn, Duco Kruijtzer, Charlotte van Wemmel, Wim van de Kamer and Pim Piet and Stroom. 

The video installation runs on four monitors, each monitor displaying five spectrum spiral towers with five hundred houses each. By giving each house a time axis, the whole video installation is about ten thousand dimensions.

Bander means in Arabic “harbour of knowledge.” I hope it’s not necessary.

I have been working for forty years as a visual artist. My website is bandervanierland.eu with a thousand pictures with utopian architecture models and city design, as well as a curriculum of ten videos from exhibitions, criticism and poetry. My works are inspired by science, mathematics and philosophy. I’m inspired by relativity, quantum theory, algorhythms, matrixes, simulations, AI, string theory and hyperspace. My works are about the fourth and fifth dimensions and n-dimensions.

I like to think about infinite numbers of space-time axes. I wrote a book myself about Space-Time-Mind-Architecture, which has been bought by Princeton University in 2016. My works are about the construction of thought, the brain, the universe and consciousness. I herefore use algorhythms. Eric ver Linde, the Dutch scientist, proposes that the universe is possibly steered from the edge of the universe by algorhythms. We are the substance, and we did not make the substance ourselves. This is my own statement from 2020. 

There is on my website a personal description of me. I am the inventor of the term “transcendent constructivism.” Currently we live in a postmodern culture. I must say that I am not particularly fond of postmodernism, because it often denies science. Although postmodernism thinks about the limit of scientific knowledge. However, a good book about postmodernism has been written by Frederic Jameson, called Postmodernism, refusing abstract impressionism, lyric abstraction and postmodernism.

Stroom, the arts council in the Hague, has, in the last 30 years never produced an article on art and science. They spent 220 million guilders in the last 33 years. One hour keeping office with 24 people costs 12 hundred euro per hour. Postmodern artists like: Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, Banksy and AI Wei Wei probably don’t have interest in atoms and science and abstractions, as their work is figurative. I think they fail on this, like much of their art-loving public. Postmodernism is there by fashion. Instead of the relativity theory, or so to say, the standard model, the current culture is heading for more interest in old cultures and their architecture. The relativity theory is mechanistic by nature, I am for spirituality instead. 

In this gallery there were and are many architectural models of van Eesteren, van Duisburg and RIetveld. Van Eesteren was also a city designer. At this moment moment we are in a former living house made by Rietveld. The famous Rietveld house is just around the corner. From Modernism, these work are about air, light and space. Rietveld built some 80 houses. At the moment I have achieved with Wim van de Kamer, architect, a tiny house of 52 m2, in the Achterhoek in eastern Holland, made from glass and steel. It’s called oribee, the folded B. In theory we would like to create 500 thousand units like these, to be financed with the 50 billion euro that the government now spends annually on fossil fuel business. Currently, I have also a plan for a new national museum in Holland, at Ypenburg, meant for storing and exhibiting 65 million stored artworks, that otherwise will never see the daylight again. The museum has the shape of a donut and should be 300 m wide in diameter, in silver and gold. 

I am not very fond of the architecture of Koolhaas and Hadid. I think it’s organic futurism, admiring city, and it is too big. I believe that with organic futuristic architecture, the world might become a vegetarian meatball. It is sculptural, but hardly plastic in expression, and doesn’t carry colour.

That’s it, thank you for watching this. A video of the exhibition will be shown later. 

Thank you very much, Bander van Ierland.