Ondertussen: Manon Bovenkerk

21 September - 3 December 2013
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Monday - Friday, 11 am - 5 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12 noon - 5 pm

In Ondertussen the Hague-based artist Manon Bovenkerk presents her new (and ongoing) project Monster, an interactive and web-based narrative consisting of drawings and animation. It is the story of a character who is an amalgam of a pet, a servant and a ghost. The character sees himself as human, but nevertheless he cannot deny his monstrous nature and suffers from a conflicted identity. In each episode the monster tries to adapt to one specific (human) role, and each time he fails. In the final scene the character discovers that there are others just like him. And although this does not solve all his problems, to him and to the viewer, it is a revelation.

With Monster Manon Bovenkerk sets out to explore new possibilities in her work, that consists of drawings and videos on the borderline between drawing, graphic novels, cinema and animation. In working with both moving and still images she is forced to think about major concepts like time and length of time, also in relation to the viewer. In essence the amount of time one can look at a drawing is limitless, it is completely up to the viewer. With animation, however, the aspect of time is fixed, just like the order of the images (and the order in which the story is told). The non linear and interactive set-up of the new project gives Manon Bovenkerk the freedom to play with this concept of time and to approach the narrative as a world to be explored.

In 2012 Manon Bovenkerk was granted a SPOT subsidy for a work period in Sao Paolo (Brazil) in order to deepen her knowledge of narrative strategies and visual style and to work on the storyboard.

www.manonbovenkerk.nl

PRESS
Jegens & Tevens, 26 October 2013
Blikvangen, 27 September 2013 (in Dutch)

Ondertussen
The former reception area of Stroom has been converted into a small exhibition space. On a regular basis there are presentations of artists who have received a subsidy in the categories Stroom PRO- and SPOT-grants. The informal exhibitions and presentations are intended to illustrate the diversity of the Stroom grant system. The program in the space is called Ondertussen (the Dutch word for 'meanwhile').

Archive Ondertussen presentations