upcoming bio statement texts contact
statement
Artistic point of departure
My work consists of personal interpretations of existing structures.
I intervene within the function and context of structures from public and private domains. For instance, the systems I make use from the public domain can be an encyclopedia, daily newspapers and telephone books, and for the private domains the administrative paperwork of my deceased neighbor and memorabilia from an obsessive professional runner.
My urgency for a guerilla infiltration of existing systems of information derives from my quest of an independent and intimate perception of the world: you propose (icons, priorities, order, conventions) I dispose.
To transform an existing system, I define a new set of rules that I strictly impose upon myself. Within those imposed limitations, I regularly make use of organized chance as an instrument. I like to use indirect strategies in my work; I naturally observe a distant protocol to say intimate things.
Existing systems trigger me as a research and playground as they echo the limitation of the human perceptional capacities: people strive to systemize and regulate the world into something that is clear and functional, while reality in all its complexity isn’t possible to grasp. My interventions serve the contradictory causes of freedom and control from and of systems conditioning the perception of the world. See with your eyes, nothing is definitive. The ever-changing nature of things is for me their more beautiful characteristic; to freeze them in icons, conventions and archives kill their openness and dictate upon their beauty. My work input is to propose alternative readings of the source, and in its light to question the nature of the original form.
I took out of the shelf of my library two books with which I felt a love-hate relationship as a young girl. These books were at the same time a gateway to an adult and independent world and at the same time dictating to me the relevancy of the world treasures of man-made images. At the time I wrote cynical and rebellious comments in the books. I now prefer an indirect and often almost invisible intervention in the original source. Catalogue des Chefs-d'œuvre du Musée du Louvre, 2008, is a facsimile of a 1976 Louvre catalogue. In this facsimile I replaced pictures of paintings by photos I made of the paintings while visiting the Louvre (In my photos the anonymous visitor intrudes the paintings, becoming part of the iconic image). By having the visitors become one with the image I question the perception of referential paintings and their subjective interpretation.
In extension of Catalogue des Chefs-d'œuvre du Musée du Louvre I appropriated a series of paintings, by photographing them with spectators seen from the back (Le Louvre,2008). I staged these photographs and printed them at life size, to exemplify my perception of these icons in their museum surroundings.
The above described works came as a consequence from 180 degrees encyclopaedia (2007), a facsimile of a Larousse encyclopedia, in which I replaced 200 photos of landscapes and monuments from all over the world by photographs taken at exactly the same locations but shot in the opposite directions (180°) to the original images. In contrast to the encyclopaedist, who perceives the world through a seemingly objective method, I used a subjective method to manipulate the perception of the world.
Opening Soon / Opening Now is a series of public installations and performances I developed last year in the studio that was temporarily assigned to me (a former brothel). The physical space of the brothel became the structure for my research. I investigated the identity of the space itself to echo the question of my position as an artist within the boundaries of this public assignment. The space was transformed successively into a public library, a golf club, a Turkish snack bar, a symposium for urban development, an agnostic temple, a public swimming pool and a new wing for the Anne Frank House. The project resulted in a series of staged photographs in which found footage of the different functions are projected upon this space (KP23, 2009).
The following quote from George Perec describes best the underlying motive of my artistic research:
“It is clear to me that the only way to claim freedom within the specific enclosure is to design a construction within or atop of the existing structure. It doesn’t destroy it but changes its identity. It offers new possibilities to interpret the existing system, an added value.”