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KAREN OOSTENBRINK / FÜR MARION VON WALJA / January 11 – February 16, 2008

exhibition views (please click on the image to enlarge):


(Photos: Uwe Walter)


The new work by the Dutch artist Karen Oostenbrink is titled "FÜR MARION VON WALJA" (: to Marion from Walja). By coincidence we step into the penpal correspondence between two girls from the '60s. The letters from the Soviet Union were kept by Marion - until her death in Berlin in 2007.

Karen Oostenbrink comes across her material at flea markets. Curious, she follows the biographical traces and distills the disappeared until she comes up with the essence of a mystery. In the case of Marion Kunzmann a drawing appears on the wall, Walja sends mountains of Kazakhstan and a video-loop takes us into an empty room.

In 2006 Karen Oostenbrink received her degree from the Royal Academy of Art Den Haag showing a series of works that presented a mystery: the picture of a woman on large rocks at the sea, five pinhole camera shots of the sun and two light boxes, showing a young girl on a trip. In the same year she filmed for 24 hours a picture of a maidservant from around the 1900´s. Light comes and goes, past and future blur - time is now.

Karen Oostenbrink is fully cognizant of the media she uses. She relies on the ?punctum? of the photographic image, its frame of reference and the documentary quality of the video. In her drawings she adds the found elements playfully and fictionally. Oddly lost and yet disturbing real we meet characters or their sketch.

(Text by Wiebke Loeper, 12/2007)