Anouk Kruithof | Subconscious Travelling

My name is Anouk Kruithof. The work in this show is entitled Subconscious Travelling. It started by me finding an album just at a second-hand market, and it was apparently an album with empty negative sleeves of someone's travel archive. I could tell this because there were some indications of countries and a lot of numbers, which I didn’t understand. It really got my attention because I also come from an analog photographic background, and have always learned when you work with negatives in all different formats, 6x6, 6x7, 35 mm, you would keep this in the sleeves to protect from dust. And those pages, they were cardboard pages, all the negative sleeves are cut and really quite beautiful, formal compositions made out of the sleeves. And I have no idea why you would do that so it was for me like a catch that I was very excited about. Like, why did someone do this, what are these travel photos about? So it had this mystery which got my attention, and then I started to work with it. So I thought of the idea of how we now travel and record the world, which is obviously an iPhone or telephones which we always, everyone carries with them, and we outsource those memories or our travel memories to our phones or maybe the internet. And also we look at the travel photos of others online so in that way I feel we travel as well through imagery of others, and we can see the world through photos which we never made or never experienced. So I started to photograph every page with my iPhone with a flash, and these photos, the 99 photos came out very straightforward and simple, and that developed into this installation of the photo stickers on the wall and the pieces of glass. So, I would like to focus on some specific details as I connect it to that specific piece, Subconscious Travelling. The use of stickers, the use of iPhone, and the use of flash, can you elaborate on these? Yeah, of course the flash, when you start with that, you photograph with and without. And obviously, it needed to be an iPhone, because I felt I'm going to travel through this album of the absence of that imagery and its plastic sleeves. So I find it interesting when I flashed it, that obviously you get the reflection, so it creates an absence of pixels, actually, which to me also relates to memory loss or lost data, but also in more human way, loss of memory like the absence of that which struck me. And then, yeah, then you get an opportunity to show the work, and I start to think about the very kind of a not pretentious way of showing photographs, which is very much this matte sticker material, and it's very straightforward. It's and also directly on the wall of a museum. I really like it because it feels like you transferred the work, and you make it part of the walls or the institution. It's less an object or it has less barriers to the photographic object, the photo, the print and the wall. It's more one. And then I decided to use a few pieces of glass, make it more relating to obvious framing, for example. But on the other hand, I also thought it’s kind of highlights out of this travel album, and then of course people can see their own image reflecting on certain spots, which is also nice because then you create kind of a little conversation also with the viewers or how they perceive the work.