Martijn Hendriks: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
MIC Toi Rerehiko is delighted to premier the prodigious talent of contemporary Dutch artist Martijn Hendriks in New Zealand. Hendriks is internationally recognized for his sophisticated and deeply engaging appropriation/re-evaluation of found images, text, video and film.
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off features Hendriks’ award winning labour of love (Untitled) The Birds without the Birds, a systematic and strategic manipulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1963 film The Birds, as well as 12 Glowing Men, a spectacular appropriation of Sidney Lumet’s iconic 1957 film 12 Angry Men.
Working with a variety of media, Hendriks’ work often proceeds by acts of negation, addressing the conditions under which non-productive gestures become productive. Appropriating found images, videos, texts, and films, his works investigate the state of negation in an ever-expanding series of gestures such as erasing, deleting, removing, obscuring, hiding, displacing, postponing, withholding, disturbing, obstructing, denying, doubling or copying. By asking what remains after the objects of our attention have been removed, displaced, sabotaged, or shown to contradict themselves, those gestures add up to a questioning of our relation to images and the collective imagination.
Many of these gestures question or deceive expectations of visibility and availability, and explore moments of collapsing certainty. They explore the possible role of art as a form of critical iconoclasm, and reference the manipulation of images in news media, digital piracy, propaganda, altered images circulating on the internet, the cheap solutions of amateur video, or acts of censorship. Such and other strategies are both re-used in their questionable forms and at the same time, are reconsidered and explored as productive practices. In recent video works such as The Birds without the birds (2008 – ongoing) or the series of manipulated YouTube videos This is where we’ll do it (2008), the absence of essential elements from widely known images has taken center stage. By digitally erasing exactly those things that matter most, absence, background, memory and doubt are shown to become unexpectedly productive.
Martijn Hendriks studied at the Academie Voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg and the University of Maastricht?s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, where he graduated cum laude in 2002. In 2008 he received the international Kraft Prize for New Media for his work The Birds without the birds in the group exhibition When Absence Becomes Presence in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, centers for contemporary art, and museums of modern art. Recent exhibitions include In Real Life at Capricious Space, New York, Contemporary Semantics Beta at Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, and When Absence Becomes Presence at Washington Project for the Arts, Washington DC. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
