Manon de Boer
° 1966
Born in Kodaicanal (IN), lives in Brussels (BE).
The Dutch artist Manon de Boer makes films, videos, installations, websites and publications. In her portraits De Boer investigates memory and her own personal remembrances. She looks for a way to represent the relationship between time and space, between looking and the facial expression of the subject. The people she portrays are photogenic, and in many cases are friends and acquaintances of the artist. By looking at them through the camera, she creates both distance and intimacy. She considers those she loves as endless worlds – ready to explore and gradually get to know. Language and the voice are components of the portrait. Information is communicated in different ways, not just through language, but on other levels as well. The sound of the voices, intonation and cadence of the words count more than the content. Truth, she says, emerges in relation to the ‘other’. The other that looks at the other is an ever increasingly important theme in her work. Through her use of image, sound and music in her compositions, she subtly changes our usual perception of film. The texture of the images and the sound recordings created by De Boer, give the spectator a strong sense of time duration. The viewer is imbued with a feeling of slowing down. This slowness is in contrast to the prevalent habit of ‘just snatching a glance’. De Boer would like viewers to ask themselves what they see when the portraits develop as a function of their memories.
