Heide Hinrichs (1976, Oldenburg, Germany) is interested in the limits of the body, the transitional area between what belongs to the domain of the inner self and what we consider external. Her phenomenological investigation is expressed in drawings, objects and videos; that is to say that Hinrichs scrutinizes the matter of man’s adopted position in the world. She makes an attempt to understand and describe the experience of that position, the relationship between one position and another, even the denial of that position. The body is portrayed as a form that holds different elements together, as a container in fact, but also as a form that is beseiged—touched or put under pressure. Literally and figuratively. The question is: how do our senses inform the body? This relates both to the physical impression that external factors have on the body and to a more abstract, immaterial influence on that body. Breathing, words, gestures: these can likewise be seen as transitions between the inner and the outer, and vice versa, between the outer and the inner.
In the works of Heide Hinrichs the senses are brought into the open as fragments, as parts of a greater whole. Hinrichs plays with scale and dimensions. The fragments that she shows in her work cannot simply be connected in a direct manner. The title Demisenses refers, on one hand, to the temporal nature of the sensory experience and, on the other, to the need to generate a meaningful whole from all of those fragmented experiences. Actually the work of Heide Hinrichs deals with the body as a ‘platform’ of constant change. Hinrichs’s Demisenses are like demigods: part of the eternal world of the gods and, at the same time, part of the transitory world of mortals.
Heide Hinrichs has previously had solo exhibitions at, among other institutions, the Seattle Art Museum in the United States and the Heidelberger Kunstverein in Germany.
Seems So Long Ago Nancy by Tatiana Macedo (1981, Lisbon, Portugal) is the title of an experimental documentary for which the artist carried out research at London’s well-known museums Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Macedo’s film focuses on the museum’s ‘gallery assistant’—the guard. This is done by starting with the idea that the position of the gallery assistant is a fundamental part of the institution’s mise en scène. Macedo makes the guard’s subjective experience of space and time the basic premise of her film. She places a sharp focus on the guards, who remain curiously anonymous, as the viewer is able to zoom in on all of their movements and behavior, including intimate details such as closeups of movements of the hands. Macedo’s film does not adhere to the rules of traditional visual anthropology; instead it redefines, as it were, the personal, close ties that develop throughout the process of the film. Macedo makes no use of text; the gathered visual material yields a new experience of observing those who observe, while ‘real time’ impressions are moreover linked with manipulated moments of attention or, the very opposite, of an escape from this. In addition to this she plays, from a cinematographic point of view, with the notion of ‘waiting’. Macedo’s camera fluctuates back and forth between the human figures and the neoclassical and postmodern architecture of the spaces in which they move. Seems So Long Ago Nancy (the title is taken from a song by Leonard Cohen) breaks down the walls between the personal and the social by raising questions about the boundaries we put up between the private and the public, as well as hybrid forms of these.
In previous group exhibitions at the gallery, and at Art Rotterdam 2012, we have shown photographic works by Tatiana Macedo, from a series that she produced on a parking lot for tour buses in Shanghai. The film now being shown reveals, once again, her remarkable photographic eye. Macedo recently had her first solo exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon.
Tatiana Macedo´s exhibition at tegenboschvanvreden is sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation