| HENRIETTE DINGEMANS |
Henriëtte Dingemans (1961) Koedijk 32 Dit e-mailadres wordt beveiligd tegen spambots. JavaScript dient ingeschakeld te zijn om het te bekijken. Curriculum Vitae |
For some years I have been making images based on or using photographs I have taken myself. The images have been made in several stages, I have used darkroom techniques to change and manipulate the film image, superimposition, merging and so on. Not all the results are "photographs". Some have been combined with other images and have become elements in installations, light boxes. More recently, I have been using "virtual" techniques, scanning my photos into the computer, and so creating images which may be reproduced in various other media, this has advanced into interactive installations.Place and face are a key importance to me; voyaging and movement are a way to approach the universal aspects of place and its people, two elements I see as inextricable.I was raised in Zimbabwe and South Africa, from 1961 to 1979 with a Dutch father and Irish mother, and lived in Ireland from 1979 - 1984 before settling in the Netherlands to study and then work as an artist. Growing up in South Africa, I was a witness to that country's terrifying movement through the Apartheid period, though I had left before the struggle for freedom reached its final phase in the mid - 1980 ' s. I believe that my experiences there have given me deep insight into the formidable exercise of powers arrogance and authority, something I have encountered in other places since, never without a shiver of recognition deep in my soul.My most recent series of works come from a return to Africa, when I spent a total of six months in Ethiopia. These photographs are concerned with global issues and political events, but these reveal themselves in my work through the individual faces and figures.I went on a long trek through the Omo region, with an anthropologist, studying the coexistence of the Maanient people. The highland people are the hunter/gatherers and the lowland people are nomadic, travelling with their cattle between grazing areas. Both are self - sufficient in respect of "our" world, with all their possessions and implements hand fabricated. They interacted in subtle ways which to me reemphasise their "connectedness" with their own place.The images I made both during the journey and when I returned to my studio are in a sense meditations on the "other". They underscore the impossibility of representing the "other", a bloodless abstraction. These are concrete people who exist in very specific, concrete ways in a particular, concrete place; they are stitched into their ecosystem as part of its fabric, and are
not "separate". I found that to confront them was not so much to learn more about them as to realise how we see them. It makes instructively visible the restrictive packaging we have used to consign them to the category "other" --
|
