Koen Hauser
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Work from the series De Luister van het Land, A la Recherche de l’Aventure Perdu and Opus Magnum Atomium. All of Hauser’s works have a distinct pseudo-scientific, pseudo-realistic aesthetic that reminds me of old phrenology portraits from the early years of photography.
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Galerie 37 Spaarnestad invited me to make new work with material from the Spaarnestad Photo archive, one of the largest pressarchives in Europe. De Luister van het Land is a caleidoscopic collection of over 400 photographs. By means of a selection based on personal interests, fascination, and my obsession with the notion of ‘the diorama’, it interweaves impressions of a (re-created) fantasyworld with pictures on the process of creation, using my personal appearance. These images of the creation process – I call them performéances -, are the residu of performances held to invoke the spirit of creation. Together with the narratives of old photographs they form an installation on imagination and ephemerality.
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In 2006 I started taking photographs in musea, amusementparks and other man-made tourist attractions. Looking at these places from a different angle, a parallel world emerged, consisting of movie-still like imagery that together form the basis of the artistbook A la Recherche de l’Aventure Perdu, that will appear at the beginning of 2009.
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‘As a child I used to think that atoms were actually planets in space, like the earth on which we live. A divine universe in which the tiniest particles are perfect replicas of the whole universe.’
For me, the photo’s in this Opus Magnum Atomium series form personal dioramas on a metaphysical world. A world that lies at the heart of my fascination with themes such as isolation, birth and death, childhood, animals, science and physical alienation.