For four days in June, a Protestant church in Amsterdam hosted a braiding of deep time reflections. Referred to by the artists as a “temporary seizure”, it felt more like a temporal one; a crack in the continual flux of knowledge and being (or epistemology and ontology as the more typical art/academia choice of words would be), recalling questions both older and newer than the institution they were presented in. “interface trilogy: glossolalia” didn’t blind with false enlightenment (whether the sort typical of the church it was staged in, or the Masters program it came out of) but rather saw the collaborative art practice iida-ssi illuminate the importance of physical space for thought, especially ones without prescribed answers.

Despite being spread across multiple venues, amongst which a bar, a movie theater and an old court house, the 2022 graduation show of the Sandberg Institute (the MFA program of the Rietveld Academy) saw most of the five main departments exhibited side by side. But the Dirty Art Department got to section themselves off in the old courthouse' parking garage. While this underground space emphasized the “dirty” of it all, it was the piece by iida-ssi (the practice headed by iida johnson and ssi saarinen, fostered by the program for the past two years) that most delivered on the program’s stated “final challenge” of “creating new contexts.” Of course, their work being the exception within this exception—the sole installation in the additional venue of de Thomas church—didn’t hurt in making it stand out.

De Thomas is a Protestant church, which seems of note here too. For the unbaptized (as I am): Protestantism is a stream of Christianity that came out of the Reformation, characterized by allowing its believers to choose, based on their own interpretations of the bible, what God might expect from them. Meaning that each Protestant church is independent in forming its own doctrine, unlike the Roman Catholic Church (for instance), which follows the Vatican. This doesn’t mean Protestants are necessarily less strict (quite often the opposite), but it’s the refusal to bow down to a single hegemonic interpretation that’s in synergy with iida-ssi’s work. 

When one entered the (from the outside) unassuming building of de Thomas, one’s eyes had to adjust to the darkened brutalist interior before trying to separate the architecture from the art. As somewhat typical of these holy buildings; smell, sight, and sound overtook the senses. But this was no sanctified ceremony. Multiple parts worked in tandem to form the intervention: A DIY boiler emanated fossil-fueled fumes. Brooding vocalizations ricocheted off the exposed concrete walls. And in front of the pulpit, on the bare brick floor, the congregation’s seating had made way for woven wreaths left in cryptic patterns. A type of communication? Or perhaps a resurrection; one to recall Horace, the Roman poet who wrote of nature in 20 BC that it “will always hurry back, and before you know it, break through your perverse disdain in triumph.”

Further to the back of the church another force stuttered. Four curved “Odyssey G9” monitors faced each other in a perfect circle, displaying a supercut of 360° found footage. Along with its candy-laced hardcore rave score, the video commanded the room whenever it did appear. Profundity juxtaposed with mundanity in its mix of what humans had chosen to look at with their widest eyes. It gave the impression of an Adam Curtis doc at 10x speed (sans the monotonous voice-over). But two clips were made to stand out. Shown in full with their own audio overtaking the soundtrack, they arrived like revelations: one of a burning forest, captured by a GoPro left in the middle of the carnage. The other of a man sitting on the hood of his car, stopped by the side of a road bordering a glowing field of flowers. Whether he was filming in order to share the view or to place himself within the view, remains of little difference, captured as it was by the all-seeing eye.

The final piece that made up this rupture was the largest in scale but least pronounced in significance. A large black construction tarp was strung in front of the church's only floor-to-ceiling window. Adding to the darkened mood without blocking the light completely, this grieving veil most underlined a sense of work-in-progress. A gesture of non-absolutism, dressing up the work to be in flux rather than finished. Making this point more powerfully, though, were the actual congregants who continued to come and go throughout the weekend, at times walking past the tarp and halo of screens in order to light their daily candles at the back of the church.

This holy space was initially offered to students by Sandberg Institute when the Dirty Art department’s assigned garage had become too crowded (to the point of students bickering over specific parking spots). But once seeing the incredible interior of de Thomas, one wonders why this wasn’t the space being fought over. Maybe it was the suspicion that inevitably crept up when first entering now as well; that the church would end up doing the heavy lifting. A frame outshining the work it is meant to contain. Most other pieces in the graduation show would indeed have been elevated by this modernist place of worship. But “interface trilogy: glossolalia” stands out because it would not work anywhere except in the church. The work wasn’t merely entombed within this architectural wonder, but actively bent along its axes, playing with its origin as a space for contemplation. In a careful balancing act, iida-ssi never capitulated to the building’s awe with some Stockholm syndrome affectation, nor fully colonized the space. There were no obvious condemnations, no pitching Christianity against the halo of technology, or implications of man’s wrath against the wreaths. Instead, all pieces, including the building itself, felt like they were placed together in a continuum, more in search of a mood than a prefigurative meaning. In a way, iida-ssi had called the church’s bluff by doubling down on its tagline and creating a true “home away from home, to reflect on life.”

Admittedly, this could be one of the “outcomes that aren’t meant” as iida-ssi anticipated in their own description of the work. But it’s exactly this explicit openness to interpretation that captivates and that puts them in such stark contrast to the majority of their fellow graduates—arguably even the major landmark exhibitions to have opened this year. As one review of the Whitney Biennial put it: “almost every work here relentlessly and explicitly announces its meaning, which not only misunderstands the locus of art's meaning but trivializes whatever content the work might have had if it wasn't so preoccupied with being understood.” Yet in de Thomaskerk, amidst the glossolalia, there were no clear morals, ideologies, or -isms to be found. No doctrine of guilt, personal traumas laundered or belabored, nor virtues signaled. Instead, I got to bring those myself.

Perhaps the wreaths spoke to the blurred lines between pagan traditions and Christianity (such as Christmas not being Jesus’ actual birthday but a remnant from those earlier beliefs steeped in ecological cycles). But the presence of these woven tapestries in such a male-led institution made me think about a passage from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent book, The Dawn of Everything. Besides many other deep histories being reconsidered in an archaeologically-backed new light, the book questions the likelihood of complex math having sprung fully formed from the mind of the male scribes or sculptors: “Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork. What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation–by men, etching their claims in stone–of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.”

The circle of curved “Odyssey” monitors inverted what they’re usually for (video games and financial analysis), choosing to instead show a more “real” type of footage in the form of ripped home-grown 360° clips. While the framing made me wonder which visuals constitute forms of “reality-making,” it was less the images on display and more so the displays themselves that felt the most thought-provoking and playful. The retortion of the 360° videos inward allowed for their full horizontal range to be visible, and yet made it impossible for the human eye (or the lenses of our phones for that matter) to be able to truly “see” it all at once. Refusing to be captured for insta-reproduction, it was a mediagenic way of staging some of art’s familiar questions about narcissism and image-making: Are we looking in, or looking out? At who? For who?

Of course, the opening within that circle of monitors did entice to crouch down; to get off the bondage-clad chairs that surrounded the displays and instead meet the video at eye-level; discovering the only way to take in their full panorama. The masochistic tint of the leather-belt-covered chairs, combined with luring visitors to “kneel” at this mediated altar, mere steps away from the financial heart of Amsterdam, might seem a bit too on-the-nose. But in the space it never felt forced or like a “gotcha” moment. Rather, it added to the sense of multiple points of view being valid within this larger tapestry—one in which the smell of gasoline, the crown of wreaths, the veiled tarp and the continued visitations of congregants were all still very much at play.

It’s this totality that most recalled a passage from Hegel (that I read by way of Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom): “​​The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”

That iida-ssi didn’t necessarily intend or force any of these interpretations, but merely created the affectations that brought them on, is an impressive feat from artists that only just graduated. At a time when certain highly-visible downtown New York kids are turning towards Catholicism in what reads like a pointed quest for meaning, and while the majority of art is overleveraging on its own intended meaning, this intervention was a breath of fresh (despite somewhat gas-station-y) air. With “interface trilogy: glossolalia”, iida-ssi turned a Protestant church into a true public space where one can reflect on the flux of time and our complicated roles within it, including the building’s own. If only this was a permanent seizure, instead of a temporary one. I would go every Sunday.