The Polish word ‘obsada’ means ‘film cast’ but can also mean ‘working party’ – it connotes the distribution of work positions as well as placing of a plant in the ground. Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s obsada, is a collaboration with an all-female film crew, who are at the same time the film’s cast. It is an attempt to propose non-patriarchal narratives and methods of work. Involving a group of MA and PhD students from the Lodz Film School, the change they strive for does not consist simply in replacing men with women in film production; rather, the work develops in an open and improvised process – sensitive to the context of the place and the polyphony of the team. The women’s individual and collective experiences resonate with locations in the Film School and in Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz.
Biography
Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. With these works, always shown in specially developed architectural settings, she shows widely in the art and museum context. Recent solo presentations include: Dance Floor as study Room 2024/25 at YCAM, Yamaguchi; unset on-set at Museum of Contemporary art Tokyo (MOT) 2022/23, tono lengua boca at CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Her work was recently included in Delinking and Relinking, collection presentation van Abbemuseum 2021-2026; Sonsbeek 20->24,, Arnhem 2021; of bread, wine, cars, security and peace… at Kunsthalle Wien, 2020; Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Singapore Biennial 2019. Her films Two Stones (2019), Hier. (2021), of girls (2023) and A Prelude (2025) premiered in the International Competition of FID Marseille.
Van Oldenborgh is a member of the (Dutch) Society for Arts and a recipient of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (2014).
