Marijn Ottenhof | VONK

Marijn_Ottenhof

Imagine we don't eat as we used to. With the absence of food during a dinner party, how would we set the dinner table? Would mouths turn into perverse openings and the act of eating into an obsolete ritual? The memory of plates and dishes, kitchen tiles and nozzles resonates in an imaginary fetish of future humans with the ceramics of the past.

Marijn Ottenhof is a visual artist working in a variety of media including performance, video, installation and sound. The starting point in her work is a fascination for trust and control. The current timeframe, with its rapid succession of crises, seems to create an entire society suffering from post-traumatic stress. The untrustworthiness of authorities and the inability to walk on solid ground manifests itself in symptoms such as hypervigilance, repetitive patterns, flashbacks, hearing voices, fragmentation and emotional dissociation, which recur as visual strategies in her work. Reality as a construct translates itself into minimalistic, stylised stagesets in which actors awkwardly deliver lines from critical theory and political speeches, to then switch to improvisation based on their own narrative or experience. Front and backstage, fact and fiction, the scripted and the unscripted are mixed up. In electronic music sets she produces the sonic backdrops to the themes of trauma, memory, (science)fiction, rehearsals, the weird and the eerie.

Marijn Ottenhof (NL, 1985) graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2014 (BA) and from the Royal College of Art, London in 2019 (MA). She took part in several international residencies including a three month project in a mental health clinic in New York and the ceramics postgraduate EKWC (European Ceramic Work Centre) in Oisterwijk, Netherlands. Her works and performances have been presented in shows in the Netherlands including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and artfair UNFAIR. In the UK her work has been presented at Somerset House, Gossamer Fog and The South London Gallery. She is a core tutor at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch, Netherlands.