YOUR SILENT FACE
Your Silent Face is an installation created specifically for Galerie Lecq in Rotterdam. The installation primarily arose from a desire to let things happen. To get out of my head. Away from photography, away from the computer, away from the screen. Back to basic materials, to space, to the act of making itself. Underlying the work is a fascination with the material and symbolic instruments of death. During the day the work is cold, repulsive to some (the photo) at night (the movie) it all changes into a club-like death-party.
Beside the actual installation, the images below show the origins and the process. The first images presented here were created by Cromagnon Exercise Artists. For more information, please see the dedicated section elsewhere on this website. In the process
I uploaded the images above into an AI image generator and used a prompt asking for these figures to be placed in a mortuary setting. The picture below is what the generator made from it, it has been the actual starting point for the installation.
Halfway through the project I grew resistant to reproducing the original idea, I let go of that ambition and started changing things intuitive. What remains, therefore, is not a finished object in the original sense. And yet, that incompleteness feels more honest to me. I do not believe in the idea of a completed life.
Your Silent Face is not about gender or religion, it attempts to conclude nothing, to explain nothing, and to fix nothing definitively. For me it is just a transitional work and perhaps, also a work without words that is there until it is not there anymore. Maybe the work asks for existential participation. I don't know, I leave the catharsis to you.
Below you see images of the the gallery itself, a small bridge keeper's house. The postmortem transport table I bought from a coroner in Voorburg.
And just for fun some images created over the past several months during the development and production of the work.
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of CBK Rotterdam and the Bekker-la Bastide Fund (via Stichting Volkskracht). Special thanks also go to Herman Lamers of Galerie Lecq.
