Ellen de Bruijne

Constant Dullaart

11 Apr - 16 May 2009

© CONSTANT DULLAART
CONSTANT DULLAART
"Earthquake 2.0"

Constant Dullaart (the Netherlands, 1979) has just finished his residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, with a practice focusing on contemporary image language at it's dirtiest. Trained as a video artist, his work has recently focussed on the Internet and re-contextualizing found material. His works are widely discussed online. Brian Droitcour writes for Art in America magazine:

"Dullaart's readymades, however, demonstrate his interest in what might be called 'default' style - the bland tables of sans serif text and soulless stock photography that frame ads for some of the most common search terms (auto insurance, cheap airline tickets, pornography), baring the underbelly of the Internet's popular use. But Dullaart's readymades are more than a formalist exploration of the Internet at its most banal. They are also a study in the relationship of the index to its referent, an issue that Rosalind Krauss connected to the readymade in her 1976 essay 'Notes on the Index, Part 1.' Krauss defines indices as 'the traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.' .... Dullaart is a persistent investigator of new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Internet."

In the exhibition ‘Earthquake 2.0’ Dullaart combines his earlier interests in found footage with contemporary technology. It shows an installation in which he places the viewer in the middle of a disaster documented during the web 2.0 era. This work shows the change in how the world around us is represented, a default filter found in video editing software can be the same as a disaster that killed over 100.000 people.

Dullaart teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld academy, and curates several events in Amsterdam, such as the periodically held Lost and Found evenings, and the recently finished exhibition ‘Contemporary Semantics Beta’ in Arti et Amicitiae. His work is shown internationally in places as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Art in General and MWNM gallery in New York, ICA London, Montevideo, de Appel, W139, and will be shown in the Stedelijk Museum exhibition ‘Off the Record’ during Art Amsterdam this summer.
 

Tags: Constant Dullaart, Gerrit Rietveld