"A Day in Holland / Holland in a Day: Photos and Video Works by Barbara Visser "
2001-07-14 until 2001-10-06
Hague Center for Visual Arts, Stroom hcbk
Den Haag, , NL

A Day in Holland / Holland in a Day is the title of the exhibition of a new series of photo and video works by the Dutch artist Barbara Visser. For her solo presentation in Stroom in The Hague she travelled to Huis Ten Bosch Stad in Japan, where copies of historical Dutch cityscapes have been built. Barbara Visser's affinity with the phenomenon of Huis Ten Bosch Stad lies in its exploitation of a perfect imitation of reality. She visited this artificial Holland with two actors whom she transformed and photographed on the spot.

The visitors of House Ten Bosch Stad are also treated to a number of special events, like a highly stylized version of the big flood in Zeeland. This formed the inspiration for her new video work 'The Big Flood Zeeland 1953 / Japan 2001'.

The works Barbara Visser has made over the past 10 years show a distinct fascination with concepts like identity, real and unreal, objective and manipulated reproduction. In A Day in Holland / Holland in a Day, too, she plays ingenious games with our notion of perception: historically-accurate reproduction or entertainment, functional space or two-dimensional scenery, an original face or a revised mask? Once more reality and representation are called into question.

Barbara Visser (Haarlem, 1966) studied at the Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam, Cooper Union in New York and the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht (The Netherlands). Since 1992 her work has been exhibited in well-known museums, institutes and galleries in The Netherlands and abroad, like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and the Contemporary Art Center of Vilnius (Lithuania). Barbara Visser is the recipient of various prestigious awards like the Charlotte Köhler Prijs (1996), the Young Belgian Painters Prize (1999) and the Friedrich Gildenwart-Vordemberge Preis (2000),

On the occasion of the exhibition a small publication will be released.

IMAGE:
Barbara Visser 2001
Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery

Related Links:

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Other Important Exhibitions in Netherlands