Look Who's Talking: Noor Mertens (NL)
Discover the work of Willem Oorebeek through an insightful tour of OBSTAKLES led by Noor Mertens.
In 2015, Noor Mertens developed a compact exhibition around the early works of Willem Oorebeek in the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, which she staged with works by Richard Artschwager, Marcel Duchamp, Gerhard Richter and others. The film ‘Film’ by Samuel Beckett, the only film Beckett made, with an old Buster Keaton in the lead role, could not be shown during the exhibition due to restrictive film rights. Selections from this film form the prelude to the tour.
Biography
Noor Mertens has a background in musicology and art history. Since 2021, she leads Kunstmuseum Bochum, a museum in the post-industrial Ruhr area of Germany focusing on art from the 20th and 21st centuries, with an important collection of works by artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Together with the team, she explores how an art museum can become a truly public space for and within the city. Before, she was director of Kunstverein Langenhagen, where she organized exhibitions such as ‘She is the Future - An Exhibition Ignited by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’, ‘Christopher Knowles - These Are The Days’, ‘Aroundabout Jack Jaeger’ and ‘Patricia Esquivias, Cardón Cardinal’. As junior curator and curator for modern and contemporary art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, she developed exhibitions with artists like Beni Bischof, Elias Lassry, Alexandra Bircken, Aleksandra Domanovic, Isabel Nolan, Dina Danish, Marijn van Kreij and Helen Mirra.