The video works by visual artist Ulf Aminde do not provide an objective picture of reality. Both maker and subject have their own experience of reality, and it is precisely the relationship between the two that Aminde focuses his lens on. Aminde works between the border of video art, performance and theater, which he calls ‘performative film’. Sometimes he takes full control by directing the situations, but he also lets himself be guided by the consequences of those. For example, it may happen that Aminde enters with his camera in to the world of his subject, only to step out of it three days later with no sense of what actually took place. ‘This is a really good sign for me’, he says, as with this material he creates a story that is equivalent to his own interests.

It is not uncommon that when art is social engaging, we take a critical stance towards the role of the maker in the process. Ultimately it is the maker who edits the material that is created and shows it to the public. This critical stance was put to question during the symposium: ‘Kunst & Werkelijkheid’. The symposium was part of the Museum Night 2016, and took place amid Ulf Aminde's exhibition ‘The School of No Return’. The subjects in Aminde's video work, featured in the exhibition, fall under a social realism. We see junkies found on the internet, a messy family member living with her rabbits, unemployed youth and disabled people. During the symposium, Felix Ensslin, dramatist and professor of aesthetics in Stuttgart, asked Aminde an obvious but also inevitable question: what form of reality inspires you as a maker? The social reality, the reality of subjectivity or the desire to transcend it?

The symposium included conversations between: Ulf Aminde, Felix Ensslin, Edo Dijksterhuis, Marcel van Eeden, Jannet de Goede, Michael van Hoogenhuyze, Harmen de Hoop and Nina Polak, with a presentation by Jean-Pierre Geelen 'The truth is a lie’.