Catalogue > At random

Where I'm calling from was an exhibition of new work by Netherlands-based artist Minne Kersten. Working with the architecture of David Dale Gallery, Minne constructed a detailed and evocative environment exploring the narrative capacity of inanimate objects, and their role in triggering memory in a transportative way. Minne takes a literary approach to her work, blending installation, video, sculpture and drawing to craft the backdrop of a fictional world. Through her immersive installations, she reveals buildings to be receptive to stories and traumas, as she stages situations subjected to chaos, decay, and deconstruction. Minne explores the traces of events left behind and exposes them as witnesses of private stories retained by the walls that surround us. Her work considers the relationship between the real and imagined, the ordinary and the uncanny, and poses questions about memory and its reconstruction. Working across a range of media, she interweaves personal themes such as mourning, loss and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables, and symbols.

Minne Kersten (1993, NL) is an artist based in Paris and Amsterdam, working with video, installation and paintings. Underneath these media lies a literary approach in which she combines several techniques to construct a world where objects and scenes hold traces of both facts and fiction. She speculates on how we can recall events, memories and stories, by tracing what is lost in what remains. Her work considers the relationship between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the ephemeral, and poses questions about memory and reconstruction. By drawing attention to the act of construction in both our shared real and imagined world, her work offers a connection between intimate themes such as mourning, loss and desire, and the collective domain of fiction, fables and symbol making. Painting and drawings are continuously made during a process of introspection and research. They serve as a form of visual note taking, made alongside her spatial approaches. In recent years, she has used the method of crafting an architectural environment, which reveals itself as a scenography, a film set, and subsequent sculpture. Often informed by personal encounters with spaces, these sculptures provide a tangible terrain to explore how a space can witness or distort stories and events. By staging situations that embed symbolic elements such as the appearance of animals or phantom presences, she refers to ways of how the past can leave impressions on the present. Subjecting her scenes to chaos, decay and disruption, she suggests different outcomes of the familiar circumstance of feeling unstable, losing control and reaching a state of transition.