Janneke van der Putten at TENT

Artist: Janneke van der Putten

Exhibition title: All Begins With A

Curated by: Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk

Venue: TENT, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Date: July 16 – September 28, 2015

Photography: Janssen Adriaans, images courtesy of the artist and TENT, Rotterdam

For her exhibition All Begins With A, Janneke van der Putten (1985, lives and works in Rotterdam) presents a number of recent and ongoing works in which the relationship between sound, voice, and singing and body, time, and space are investigated through her personal experiences, physicality, and voice. The lengthy walks, tours and listening studies that Van der Putten conducts are an important starting point for her work. In that, she makes use of her voice as an instrument to scan and articulate a particular situation and space, and thereby allow an environment’s often-hidden features to be foregrounded and experienced. The work is often driven by the rhythms of nature and the transitions of day and night. Hence, Van der Putten’s practice could be considered as a form of psycho-geography: she establishes relationships between herself and external, given realities, such as a cemetery in Rotterdam, the isle of Vassivière, Lima’s urban environment, or the desert coast of Peru, and engages in direct relationships with things, such as bird sounds, gunshots, and echoes.

Janneke van der Putten graduated with Honors from the Department of Textiles at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2009 and completed the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 2013.