As Time Goes By

Simultaneous exhibitions in Rotterdam and Berlin.

Bert Danckaert

Jan Koster
Marjan Laaper
Martin Luijendijk
Marleen Sleeuwits
Esperanza Spierling

Our seeing is driven by imagination.
What remains of this as time goes by?
Six artists think of time and leave viewers to their imagination

Bert Danckaert
Bert Danckaert’s photographs show us a world that is at once exceptionally familiar andsingularly strange. They produce in us a sense of strangeness.
At first sight Danckaert's photographs show us things so familiar that we would scarcely notice them if we saw them while walking down the street. What makes his work so striking is that it seems to show what we take to be pure and simple reality as a stage-set. The invariable absence of living creatures – human or animal – only serves to confirm this.
(part of ‘The other side of the other side’  by Jean-Louis Poitevin)

Jan Koster
Jan Koster is known for his panoramic photo collages of landscapes. In his series ‘Dutchscapes’, he has made the beauty and diversity of the Dutch coast visible, a sharp eye and knowing eye revealing its unexpected poetry.A similar aesthetic has been adopted for his pictures of Havana. .

Marjan Laaper
In the videoworks of Marjan Laaper, one experiences specific moments when times become elastic and one cannot keep a hold on it. It magnifies, extends and zooms in an instant that would otherwise disappear. The artist aims to look deeper into the meaningbehind things which we would like to be revealed to us or uinderstood. That is the search for similarities in everyday events, universal laws of nature and human behaviour.

Martin Luijendijk
Martin Luijendijk shows in his photography recognizable, while alienating images of areas in which lived and worked but no people are shown. The essential of all his work is that the environment shaped by the people is also the viewer. These mechanisms emphasize broadly that individual free will is relative. Luijendijks work emerges as permanent projects.

Marleen Sleeuwits
The photographs of Marleen Sleeuwits are created because of her fascination for her surroundings, which she experiences as an enchanting scenery, and where she searches for a tension between beauty and a feeling of oppression.
Through her use of existing artificial light, Sleeuwits recreates a new world by isolating her subjects from time and place.  In doing so, the perceptions of these surroundings are manipulated and dramatised.

Esperanza Spierling
Spierling’s interior views of libraries, coliseums, entrance halls, swimming baths and waiting rooms are locations of public life.They are characterized by anonymity and functionality, expressed through fleetingness and bleakness. These places, constructed for mass usage, communicate emptiness and meaning far beyond familiar experience with environments like these. Precisely because this blind spot is not perceived in everyday life, Spierling seeks to reveal beauty in this void.

“Her work seizes the specific statement of alleged nothingness. Her pictures act not only as a verification of what is already visible; they provide an added value, an abundance of meanings, images and stories” (Paolo Bianchi)