INTRODUCTION TO MY WORK

Translation: Graeme Walker and Alana Gillespie

My work is an investigation of identity. For two years I have maintained that: There is no identity, there is only history. Meanings are not fixed, but are arrived at in relation to, or as a product of context. A number of my latest projects, Dead Birds, Carbomb I & II and Icons 2002-2006, are expressly concerned with the status the media has gained within society and the inevitable conflict of meanings that mediated information produces: a conflict between what is real and what is represented. The central theme of the works is an uncertainty, one between the context of seeing a reproduction of an event and the context of experiencing it.

Dead Birds consisted of two simultaneous installations in public spaces. During a period of considerable media attention of the threat of bird flu in the Netherlands, I placed small groups of dead migratory birds in strategic locations. In this way, a kind of metapurpose beyond the actuality of their natural deaths was attributed to the animals by consumers of the daily media output who witnessed the dead birds.

In Carbomb I & II I placed two damaged cars, modelled on photographs of car bomb explosions onto busy city centre intersections. With these I was searching for the archetypical media image of the bombed out car, one denied any historical context, existing purely in an encoded and mediated format.

The work Icons 2002-2006 aims to give insight in the four years following the murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, years and occurrences which subsequently became known in the media as representative of Post-Fortuynism. The altar-like shape of the installation refers to Fortuyn and other Dutch key figures in politics and society, such as murdered film maker Theo Van Gogh. A memorial to known figures who have been framed, some posthumously, as martyrs to serve needs outside of their direct personal histories.

All of these works are marked by a sense of coincidence, yet within the context in which they were made, they are also strangely inevitable. They involve a reversal in which images, denied of any history, are returned to a real situation and are therefore placed within the viewer’s personal, historical context. Their placement within public space enables the work to have an open, unlimited meaning and also enables people who are not necessarily involved in the arts (as observers or makers) to engage with the work.

Summary of my key working principles:

1. In my work I use recognisable, often contemporary social phenomena which are always oriented within public space.

2. My work is not art because of its so-called artistic form, but because of its function as art: it is about making conscious a particular context and the perception of identity that is coupled with that consciousness.