Haarlemse Lente is an annual art manifestation, created through collaboration between the most important exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Haarlem. For three days, Haarlem is dedicated to contemporary art, which has increasingly played a role in the Haarlem cultural landscape in recent years. Not only the De Hallen Haarlem museum, which has developed into one of the most important places for adventurous art in the Netherlands in recent years (as evidenced by its election as ‘Best Museum’ in Kunstbeeld in 2011, and the award of the AICA Certificate in 2013), but also artist initiatives such as Nieuwe Vide and Horizonverticaal, and a stage such as 37PK, have ensured that the city is buzzing. Ann Demeester is also welcomed to provide the city with further energy from the beginning of 2014. These developments have not gone unnoticed outside Haarlem. Haarlemse Lente is intended to draw attention to the blossoming of Haarlem as a contemporary art city, both for the people of Haarlem and to attract interested parties from the Randstad and beyond to Haarlem.

In the spring of 2014, the various art institutions in Haarlem will join forces for the third time. This year, the aim is to further deepen the collaboration, through joint components such as a substantive lecture programme by prominent speakers and with an overarching theme: ‘Form follows fiction’. The public – from initiated enthusiasts to curious visitors – can expect an extensive programme with openings, performances, lectures, guided tours and many other activities. With a large and lively event on Friday 14 March, aimed at enthusiasts and colleagues, and a weekend programme for relaxed visits, Haarlemse Lente presents a long weekend full of contemporary art.

Theme Haarlem Spring 2014 – “Form follows fiction”

For the upcoming Haarlem Spring, the Haarlem art institutions will join forces on a thematic level, in addition to the organizational, promotional and practical collaboration, and present the exhibitions and activities under the joint title Form follows fiction. The theme opens a window to offer attention to ‘the narrative’ via a broad spectrum. In recent years, a development has been visible that focuses on a re-evaluation of the relationship between language and image. Fiction and narrativity take clearer positions, alongside work that resides within a political-documentary discourse. A new imagination offers a way out of a strongly polarized field, where formalist art such as ‘New Mannerism’ or ‘New Formalism’, which emerged from the recent abstract idiom and which seems to focus primarily on the market, is at odds with activist engagement or quasi-academic art-as-research. Characteristic is that it is not only no longer not done to tell a story within the work of art, but that in these new movements there is also an explicit search for ‘a new grammar’ to tell it; a new – sometimes completely internal – logic of message and form.