The Same Room investigates the dual nature of water, as both a destructive and life-giving force. In collaboration with the Deltares Institute, she recorded a self-made filmset of a bedroom in an industrial wave-tank, where it was deliberately flooded with water for 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.
Biography
Minne Kersten lives and works in Amsterdam and Paris. She takes a literary approach to her work, blending installation, video, sculpture, and drawing to craft the backdrop of a fictional world. Through her architectural environments, she reveals buildings to be receptive to stories and traumas, as she stages situations subjected to chaos, decay, and deconstruction. She explores the traces of events left behind and exposes them as witnesses to private stories retained in the walls that surround us. Her work considers the relationship between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the uncanny, and poses questions about memory and reconstruction. Working across diverse media, she interweaves personal themes such as mourning, loss, and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables, and symbols. Instead of working with a traditional manuscript derived from the pre-imagined, her approach to filmmaking is rather an open-ended method. Shooting unscripted films with an uncontrollable element in the leading role, she allows a certain degree of chaos and unpredictability into her working process. Working with unstable circumstances, she questions why disruption has negative connotations and why chaos is often considered a threat. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions, including CAPC Bordeaux (2024), Glasgow International (2024), Bonnefanten Museum (2023), 16th Lyon Biennale (2022), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2022), the Living Art Museum (2022), Hotel Maria Kapel (2021), HISK Brussel (2021), Haus Wien (2021), and De Ateliers (2020), among others. In 2022 she was awarded the Volkskrant Fine Arts Audience Award and nominated for the Royal Award of Modern Painting (NL). She has been selected for residencies at De Ateliers (NL, 2018-2020), Triangle-Astérides (2023), and Cité Internationale Des Arts (2024). The artist is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery.