My thesis experimentally submits Olafur Eliasson’s — what I dub — watery projects frame ongoing motion or changeability similarly to the cinematic image, particularly the selected projects Big Bang...Show moreMy thesis experimentally submits Olafur Eliasson’s — what I dub — watery projects frame ongoing motion or changeability similarly to the cinematic image, particularly the selected projects Big Bang Fountain (2014), Still River (2016) and Fog Assembly (2016), yet transgress the customary image. I ask how to transgressively read the projects by their cinematic potential, or, how to analyze how constructed watery splashes, melting ice cubes or evaporating foggy clouds amplify the viewer’s sense about temporality, and space and self-existence. I set my experiment against a cinematic backdrop constructed by multiple considerations and analyses on Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light film’ series (1973 - 1975). My thesis experimentally demonstrates the cinematic potential productively inquires into the selected watery projects.Show less
In the first part the base of my research will be the landscape and more specifically the nuclear radiated landscape as visualized in the artistic medium of film and video. The post human landscape...Show moreIn the first part the base of my research will be the landscape and more specifically the nuclear radiated landscape as visualized in the artistic medium of film and video. The post human landscape caused by nuclear radiation has alienated man from nature will be discussed by framing this landscape in the ecological rethinking of T.J Demos and Timothy Morton. Their focus is on the eco-critical debates by Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres who started these debates in the 90s. I will content that these debates are able to contribute to a changing perspective, a better understanding of our relation with the Earth and the value of sustainability. Art is able to offer innovative ways to communicate important insights into human relationships with the radiated landscape. I will analyse the object-subject relationship between the observed landscape and the observer. How consciousness is attained by the construction and deconstruction of subjectivity in cultural practices that enables awareness and provokes action. In the first part I will analyse two critical art practices, realized by Diana Thater and the Otolith Group, that research the consequences of the radiated landscape of Chernobyl and Fukushima. As such, I will contend that the medium of film as used in the analysed artworks has the ability to construct and deconstruct subjectivity, overcoming the gap between object and subject, whilst creating consciousness and awareness that makes an appeal to activism. In the second part of this thesis, the artistic statement of my film installation will be expressed elucidating the decontaminating activities of the landscape in Fukushima three years after the nuclear disaster struck this area in Japan. As a visual artist I realized the film installation aware/哀れ consisting of a short experimental film with a composed soundscape that illustrates the subjective experience of the landscape and an interview film in which the relation of the Japanese cleaners with the contaminated landscape is expressed. The installation researches and questions the complex mutual engagement between the man-made landscape and a sustainable future. Next to the film installation two photographs are exhibited, cyanotypes portraying a landscape that is inflicted by the nuclear now. My theoretical research as described in the first part of this thesis is at the base of this installation. The film installation was shown in an exhibition in the Japan museum SieboldHuis in Leiden, The Netherlands from 10 till 22 February 2015 as part of this thesis.Show less
The aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary documentary is appropriating certain strategies that are traditionally only used in art, to question the difficulties of giving an accurate...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary documentary is appropriating certain strategies that are traditionally only used in art, to question the difficulties of giving an accurate documentation of the world. A world that is never transparent or simple, conflicts and situations that are never black or white. For this I will look at the photographs by documentary photographer/artist Richard Mosse, as an example for the wider phenomenon in contemporary documentary, and investigate what strategies he uses to address the problems of documenting atrocities in Eastern Congo and narrating its complicated story to the viewers. I will investigate how the boundary between documentary and art in these strategies (and because of these strategies) is shifting, what the implications are and what effect this has on the viewers. For this thesis I will examine three main strategies Richard Mosse uses in his photographs: first, the use of a certain pre-determined concept and the negation of the decisive moment, as was long (at least until the 1980s) the characteristic of documentary photography and photojournalism. Second, the aesthetization of the documentary photograph and its increasing relationship to art and, third, the presentation of the work in both an installation form as well as the placement of these projects within a cultural and art institutional environment.Show less
