For the last 3 months, Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) has had the Dutch visual artist Babette Kleijn as a guest in it’s resident program funded by the Fund for the Visual Arts (Fonds BKVB). Next to her personal work, Kleijn also gave a photography workshop to the students in our orientation course. We would like to invite you to an explanation of the work of Babette Kleijn and a presentation of the results of the works by the students of IBB on the 29th of June 2011 at 18:00.

Kleijn makes photographs. She doesn’t just shoot unprepared. After a period of intense observation of how everything works on Curacao, and after living a while on the island, she started to notice things that she wanted to bring to life. Babette wants to imitate a situation like what happens in a theater or in movies. To create a set where she exposes a certain ambience or situation using models and attributes. This we also refer to as staging of objects that she found here or made herself and that have an association that’s both suggestive and sparks the imagination but that also moves the viewer to make their own story.

Thus Babette Kleijn made a big blue screen (4×4 meters) that represents an ready made tropical sky with which she took off with the IBB students to make instant tropical pictures on the street, on the Capriles Clinic premises , on the coasts and in the garden. Ready made ‘found objects’ turn into still lives that she positions in front of the blue screen. Cacti that she manipulated and security personnel of the clinic were also models for Babette Kleijn’s impressive photographs.

The students IBB worked with and assisted Kleijn with the site specific photo shoots that she did, but were also given their own assignment. In that assignment the students were stimulated to make photographs using the three classical disciplines —portraiture, still life and landscape— that represent in a certain way the qualities of Kleijn’s work. This means that suggestion, story and alienation are manifested in the pictures. By personally assisting the students, Kleijn managed to teach them in a short time how to enrich their basic idea’s and how to engage photography in new ways. This has delivered great results, and as she says herself: “In photography one can sometimes quite literally encounter someones personality”.

On coming Wednesday 29th of June at 18:00, you can see the results of the staged photo sessions by Babette Kleijn and the photography workshop with the IBB students at the Orkidia pavilion on the premises of the Capriles clinic, mohikanenweg 8.

Entrance is free.

For more information see: www.institutobuenabista.com