Rachel de Liefde, Shutup (2017)
Tot Zover
Best of Class 2
LOSS | MEMORY | PHOTOGRAPHY. How to capture sadness in a photo? How to show mourning, or remembrance? Museum Tot Zover has work on display by four talented photographers who recently graduated from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam. They all share a personal approach to dealing with loss. In this second Best of Class the museum exhibits their poetic and compelling pictures.
In the series Best of Class we now turn to the photographers Vera van Almen, Rachel de Liefde, Nienke Steinitz and Jasmijn Duterloo. They will show new work, elaborating on their graduation projects. In none of the works, death is put literally on display. The layered photo's deal with memory, longing, loneliness, loss, melancholy and dispair.
With Best of Class Museum Tot Zover offers young talent a podium, especially students or those recently graduated in the field of art, design, architecture and/or photography. For them a special opportunity to showcase work in an institutional exhibition space. For us a chance to perceive what visions the younger generation have.on death and rememberance.
The talent is recognized by others too: Vera van Almen and Nienke Steinitz were heralded as New Dutch Photography Talent 2018 by the editors of GUP Magazine. Best of Class 2 is on show in the Large Hall of Museum Tot Zover until september 23.
Nienke Steinitz (Amersfoort, 1979) graduated from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam in 2016. Her abstract, poetic photos represent the elusiveness of existence. She visualises this theme by making use of nature and very specific sites. She creates an emotional and visual depth by means of colour, light and reflection. The work is about the complexity of loss.
Vera van Almen (Eindhoven, 1986) graduated from the Fotoacademie in 2017. Van Almens works show her melancholic outlook on life, with themes like loss and longing. In her aesthetic approach, tragedy and beauty are always combined. The unforeseen and unpredictabilty play a large role in her creative process: this explains her preferance for analog techniques.
Rachel de Liefde (Den Haag, 1969) graduated from the Fotoacademie in 2016. Transcience of life, but also vitality and beauty of the mundane, are her inspiration. With her poetic and sensual images she captures the fulness of life: the joy, sadness, vulnerability and love. De Liefde made 'Frozen wings' from her own experience of loss after suicide. It's an imagestrip where each photo translates an emotion, the series stimulate reflection and open up conversation.
Jasmijn Duterloo ('s-Hertogenbosch, 1975) completed the Fotoacademie in 2016. “My past history exists no more. What remains are memories, my upbringing and family stories. But as facts these are unreliable. Still, I base each decision for my future on this constructed past". In Duterloo’s work, time and identity play a large role. She often starts with a void in her past or a unreliable memory. She collects stories and ideas, in which she superimposes herself by way of re-enactment, and filming or photographing that experience. Eventually she makes gaps and holes in the resulting photos, to make the void tangible.