Over the last three months the IBB (Instituto Buena Bista, Curaçao) in cooperation with the Dutch BKVB Fund welcomed visual artist Lydia Schouten as her guest resident. This ‘Grande dame’ of Dutch contemporary art worked with our students next to her autonomous project. This Tuesday January 12th from 7.30 pm we hereby invite everyone for a lecture by Lydia Schouten on her work and a presentation of the work our students produced during her workshop on new media.

Modern media had great influence on our daily life, maybe more than we sometimes realize. The work of Lydia Schouten gives us an awry look behind these influences and at the same time pours it over us. In the eighties she used the seduction techniques of the media to create a dream world, full of self experienced adventures looked at from the real world. Her installations confront us with our desires, especially the sensual and sexual gaze. We are driven by loneliness en uncontrollable urges, “We worry about things that are happening somewhere else and experience them in a surrogate way. Our bodies can be somewhere while our minds are somewhere else. This makes up impotent, unsatisfied and sometimes-even feel guilty. We are always on the wrong spot, we disregards ourselves and do not value the world we are interacting with…”

Schouten made her early installations aiming to create something as light possible by using light, air and video combined with objects she designed. Currently she only experiences this way of working as a burden. Because the world is constantly and permanently changing she feels these days it is more appropriate to create installations that only contain projections of visuals and sounds. At the moment you pull the plug, nothing is left. You can surround the observer with an audio visual world, enriched with al sorts of information, and at the same time you are left with some DVD’s. This thought appeals to her. As one can see for instance in her video installation ‘Le Jardin Secret’ (2006/2007)

In Lydia Schouten’s recent work she looks at herself as an engine driver, creating a horizontal structure that can be compared with the editing of a video, which moves in time. To visualize and represent current times she want to plug into different levels of history and combine these with images from our daily lives.
The outlines of this so called ‘memory-time-space’ cannot be connected with particular spaces but merely a place where narrative elements resonate and have interaction with each other. In this way Lydia Schouten combines this in her mixed-media ‘drawing’: “Log, The Discovery of Easter Island (1722)” (2007). “The concept derived from the 18th century explorer Jacob Roggeveen, from a time when we could posses land by setting foot ashore and plant a Dutch flag. Combining this with the news lines on the many attempts of boat refugees to set foot ashore to obtain a better life, gives us new views on our actions”

For more information ons the artist: www.lydiaschouten.com

We invite you to the lecture by Lydia Schouten at De Ruijterkade 58 (Waaigat, Punda side), Curaçao on Tuesday January 12th from 7.30 pm the doors will be opened. Admission is free!