Catalogue > At random

The Same Room investigates the dual nature of water, both as a destructive and life-giving force. In collaboration with the Deltares Institute, Minne Kersten recorded a self-made filmset of a bedroom in an industrial wave-tank, where it was deliberately flooded with water over three successive days. By inverting the use of the institute’s controlled environment originally intended to prevent flooding, she questions the human desire to control the course of nature. Furthermore, Kersten is interested in the state of paralysis and tranquility that can occur upon a catastrophe, opening up a space for thinking about the end as a transitional state rather than something final. By combining the personal space of a bedroom with the horrors of a flood, the work creates a powerful and emotional image that wavers between clarity and chaos.

Minne Kersten (b. 1993, Utrecht, NL) lives and works between Amsterdam and Paris. She works on installation, video and paintings in which ephemeral occurrences and the construction of reality is explored. Through her architectural environments, she speculates on how buildings can be receptive to stories and traumas by staging situations subjected to chaos, decay and deconstruction. She explores the traces of events left behind and questions them as witnesses to private stories retained by the walls that surround human life. Working across diverse media, she interweaves personal themes such as mourning, loss and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables and symbols. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including the CAPC Bordeaux 2024, Glasgow International 2024, Bonnefanten Museum 2023, 16th Lyon Biennale 2022, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam 2022, the Living Art Museum 2022, De Ateliers 2022, Hotel Maria Kapel 2021, among others. In 2022, she won the Volkskrant Visual Arts Audience Award and was nominated for the Royal Award of Modern Painting. She has been selected for residencies at De Ateliers 2018-2020, Triangle Astérides 2023 and Cité Internationale Des Arts 2024. She is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.