M HKA Ensembles

° 1963

Lives in Rotterdam (), born in Hulst (), lives in Paris ().

The Rotterdam-based artist Lidwien van de Ven investigates and plays on our habitual ways of perception and interpretation. Her installations, photographic and video works treat motifs such as expectation, conditioning, intuition, meaning, association, imagination and reality-distortion. The process of reading and decryption of an image is central here. The artist is primarily interested in domains like religion, politics and the mediatic image. Since the start of the 1980s, Van de Ven has made penetrating, monumental black-and-white photographs where she herself is the main protagonist, though without them being self-portraits. From 1988 on, she introduces new elements into her work: animals, plants and (later) texts as well.

All the various aspects of her work – image and word, but also for example the furniture that she incorporates in her installations – constitute ‘equivalent’ building blocks for possible stories. In the 1990s her work becomes even more complex, and she handles quite diverse motifs. Her new photographs are more blurred, difficult to read and more varied in nature. Around the mid-nineties, Van de Ven makes the move to film. Much of her filmic work is quite reminiscent of the still images of photography. The artist shows the viewer series of images, carefully chosen and combined, but still without wanting to take us by the hand. She leaves it up to us to look, evaluate and draw our own conclusions. Lidwien van de Ven does not call herself a storyteller, but she does provide her public with the building blocks to construct one (or more) of their own. Her work is open to different interpretations, available for different readings.