Sharon Houkema
18 Jan - 10 Feb 2013
SHARON HOUKEMA
Why tidy my exhibition space when the whole world is in a mess?
18 January - 10 February 2013
Sharon Houkema’s artistic work explores the various mechanisms with which the world is perceived and reflected.
In her latest project, the title of which takes up and adapts a Greenpeace slogan, Houkema directs her attention towards the idea of environmentalism and illuminates it from artistic vantage points by focusing on the images and narrative structures that it employs.
For her exhibition project in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Houkema collected campaign material and corresponding items of clothing from conservational activists, as well as ‘green’, i.e. recycled or in the broadest sense ecologically correct, products from all spheres. She then arranged the stickers, coffee mugs, items of clothing, banners and toys from the past decades and the present day into an exhibition which is reminiscent, as a whole, of a not very tidy but exclusively ecologically furnished home situation. It is likely to raise a wide range of questions for the viewer due to the different, sometimes conflicting messages of these objects grouped by the artist according to purely formal criteria.
As in all her works, the artist is concerned with the question of the perspective from which things are regarded, something that changes according to our own position, and also with the way in which formal conditions – in both a concrete and metaphorical sense – are able to change the meaning of a narrative.
Why tidy my exhibition space when the whole world is in a mess?
18 January - 10 February 2013
Sharon Houkema’s artistic work explores the various mechanisms with which the world is perceived and reflected.
In her latest project, the title of which takes up and adapts a Greenpeace slogan, Houkema directs her attention towards the idea of environmentalism and illuminates it from artistic vantage points by focusing on the images and narrative structures that it employs.
For her exhibition project in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Houkema collected campaign material and corresponding items of clothing from conservational activists, as well as ‘green’, i.e. recycled or in the broadest sense ecologically correct, products from all spheres. She then arranged the stickers, coffee mugs, items of clothing, banners and toys from the past decades and the present day into an exhibition which is reminiscent, as a whole, of a not very tidy but exclusively ecologically furnished home situation. It is likely to raise a wide range of questions for the viewer due to the different, sometimes conflicting messages of these objects grouped by the artist according to purely formal criteria.
As in all her works, the artist is concerned with the question of the perspective from which things are regarded, something that changes according to our own position, and also with the way in which formal conditions – in both a concrete and metaphorical sense – are able to change the meaning of a narrative.