Kim Bouvy

Exhibition open from May 15-June 20, 2009

With: Özlem Altin, Kim Bouvy, Jeroen van Broekhuizen, Cor Dera, Marjolijn Dijkman, Radboud Mens, Reineke Otten, Sjoerd Westbroek

website TENT.

SOURCE MATERIAL presents the work of eight contemporary artists who use catalogueing, collection and classification as an artistic method in order to reconsider the meaning of history, identity and time. In recent years the art world has seen a striking interest in documentation and archiving. In the current era of Wikipedia and Web 2.o technologies, the access to source material has become virtually unlimited and the Internet functions as the archive of all archives. How can that immense amount of information be tamed? The artists in Source Material use an unorthodox way of unlocking, of ‘knowing’, in which the desire for order and clear arrangement can be converted into a passion for understanding the world. Surrounded by a flood of images, in their work they use archives, databases, and encyclopaedias or set up their own image bank. The traditional meaning and hierarchy of the images is made subordinate to a new logic, to a subversive, narrative or summarizing way of showing the world.

UPDATE june 2009:

My new book ‘Phantom City’ of 224 pages will come out in fall 2009, with Pels en Kemper publishers. A special editon of 2x 15# books with 2 different prints will be available.

‘Phantom City. A Photo Novel’ consists of about 160 images of the City of Rotterdam, coming from different sources like newspaper clippings, promotion materials, postcards, and images that Bouvy mixed with her own photographs of Rotterdam taken between 2001 and 2006.
The book unravels a story of fiction in images and text about a city, that no one knows, but everybody recognizes. In this phantom city, the present, a possible future and memories of an uncertain past, collide and merge into an unexpected narrative of ‘city fiction’.

‘Phantom City - a Photo Novel’  - Still in progress…more soon…..