The Collective, work in progress

Living and working in Berlin I developed a project in which I want to re-enact a mass-gymnastics choreography from the communist time. Research material in the form of historical images and interviews I took with former participants of DDR mass-gymnastic events, are edited together in the video ‘Es war hart / Es muss es wieder geben’. The execution of the re-enactment itself is still in process. Mass-gymnastics became a metaphor within my work for the relationship between the individual and the collective. In a time of globalization, individualism and digitalization, I am interested in the changing notion and perception of the collective and in the way in which different generations from different backgrounds deal with such changes.

Mistakes Show in NYC

This show was organized and curated by Anna Hoetjes. It took place in April 2009 at Papa B Studios in NYC. Former students from Cooper Union showed works based on their mistakes.






















Tom Badley 'I've come to get what was promised to me' 2008
Harold Batista 'The appeal of the two pealed' 2009
Lily Benson 'Plans for a film, Plants for a film' 2009
Ian Burnley 'Untitled' 2009
Emily Grenader 'Crowd Painting #3 (Times Square)' 2009
Anna Hoetjes 'Es war hart / es muss es wieder geben' 2009
Steffen Levring 'Joyride' 2009
Jessica Williams 'Untitled' 2008
Robin Willis 'Every final plan I have ever made' 2009

The Private Status of Public Art

This work was realized in collaboration with Julia Mensch and Paran Pour, as part of the show 'Künst und Offentlichkeit' at the NBK in Berlin. We photographed users of the NBK's Artothek (a place where everybody can borrow a piece of art like a book in the library) in their private space, where they had hung or placed a borrowed art piece. At the same time we recorded these people explaining their reasons for borrowing art, and their relation to art in general. Presented in the same frames and display as the art works in the Artothek itself, the private space returned to the institutional space, allowing the visitors to look through the pictures and listen to the audio material.

'Terror', performance, 2009

'Synchronized swimming', video installation, 2008

This work was made in collaboration with Violette Cleo van Tienhoven for the 5th year anniversary of bART. A video-triptych shows three portraits of women on three different monitors. They are posing in the same position for a long time in a green water ditch wearing almost identical swimming outfits. With every cut they all change to a new mutual pose, implying a synchronized choreography. They are supposed to perform a beautiful choreography but they are stuck in a ditch, prevented to move as they should.

'Tower', performance installation, 2008

This work was developted for a festival in that took place in the tower of the St. Jans Cathedral, Den Bosch. Dancer Lenneke Bisschop performed within an installation on the first floor of the tower, where a big wooden beam runs horizontally through a space directly above the vaults of the cathedral. Two videos of the towers of the ‘Zuidas’ were projected onto the brick wall in the space. The fast cars that were filmed on the motorway below the towers, were projected exactly onto the wooden beam. From the 10-meter high ceiling I hung down on ropes with bricks hanging in tights from my feet. I moved them slowly up and down. Only the bottom part of my body hangs into the projection.

'Untitled', photography, 2007