Capturing Silence: the photography of Awoiska van der Molen

Suzana Benesova
23 feb 2016
Tempo di lettura: 1 min

Ik denk niet, ik ervaar (“I do not think, I experience”) is how Awoiska van der Molen (b. Groningen, 1972) describes her approach to photography. Remote places are what attracts the Dutch artist and where she discovers the beauty of a desolate nature. All by herself, she sleeps and moves through isolated areas. By taking long exposure shots with an analogue camera, van der Molen preserves artistically what she experiences.

One can say that van der Molen’s photographs reveal a new perspective of sensing the landscapes. In a unique way, the artist captures a world of untainted wilderness and of peaceful silence, a world where time ceases to exist. It feels like she disburdens her objects of all the pervasive ‘noise’ and superficial ‘layers’ and penetrates to the core of their existence.

Opening at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Blanco at Foam Amsterdam, on view at Foam from 22 January through 3 April, is the artist’s first major museum-based solo exhibition and shows her monochrome landscape works photographed since 2009. All exposed objects were printed by hand on silver gelatine paper by the artist herself. The “unnamed” and usually large-scaled artworks appear in the intimate museum space as intensely dominant, raw and silent.