Olde Wolbers is a London-based Dutch-born artist who studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Chelsea College of Art and Design.
As her website states “Since the mid-1990s Olde Wolbers has been working in video, combining analogue imagery with fictional narration. The videos are shot under water in handmade model sets that are dipped in paint to create unstable environments. In the most recent works the music soundtrack has been composed by Daniel Pemberton.”
The artist is interested in weaving together fact and fiction into narrative pieces. She examines the “tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures”. She creates fragmentary and disorienting worlds in which it is difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, where “reality” is depicted as fluid.
In her works, physical or virtual structures like houses or trailers speak in voices telling the experiencer the stories of themselves. For example, “Placebo 2002” is a fictional based on the medical syndrome Pseudologica Phantastica where invented experiences are presented as reality.
It was necessary to book the visit to this event in advance. It is set in a dilapidated house, 87 Hackford Road London SW9 ORE in Brixton near Stockwell tube. There is a blue plaque on the wall which says that Vincent Van Gogh was a tenant there from 1873 to 1874. The plaque was added after a local postman traced Van Gogh’s history, and it was saved from demolition.
Olde Wolbers found fragments of this story from newspapers, oral histories, and literary works which she uses to create a broken, untrustworthy narrative which is recounted by the house itself. The piece uses the recorded voices of actors playing the different characters, combined with music and disturbing natural sounds which help to create an insubstantial, ghostly atmosphere. I felt I was on un-solid ground literally, and metaphorically.
I found this an interesting piece, and I was struck by the reactions of some of the other visitors. Some found it frustrating because they couldn’t understand “the whole narrative” and they “missed pieces of the story”. I think this was exactly what the artist was attempting to do, in suggesting that no “historical truth” is complete, that every person’s story and identity is an invented one. I recommend a visit.
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2014/yes_these_eyes/about_the_project/yes_these_eyes
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