ESPER POSTMA

Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, 2011
Sculpture
Materials: wood, bricks, metal, glass, street tiles, plants, sand, earth, cardboard boxes, tl lights, taxidermic animals

The work depicts a cut out from a fictional museum of natural history and a part of the street that is surrounding it.

By juxtaposing the interior of a museum with its direct surrounding several objects are given the same stage. An ordinary object like a street tile gets an equal value to an object in a vitrine. Which objects should be part of Natural history? How can we write the history of nature from a human perspective? Can a human quality such as ‘guilt’ be imposed on animals?

Former hospital, Beelitz-Heilstatten, Germany, 2010
Installation
Materials: earth, plants, balustrade

The exhibition space is in a former tuberculosis hospital in former East Germany. The hospital consisted of several buildings that currently have different functions; some have practical functionality such as a neurological hospital, and a temporary art academy. Other buildings serve mainly to evoke a feeling of nostalgia, as an objectification of history: a filmset, a museum, and one building has fallen to ruin.

The work is a displacement of a fragment that includes elements of this ambiguity; a theatrical image that seems to be a gesture made out of nostalgia. But, by looking closer, one notices the contemporary trash in between the dirt: small pieces of glass, plastic and old newspaper. The setting is a fragment taken from the garden next to the building and is carefully reconstructed. One of the windows looks out to the spot it was taken from, leaving a clean part of earth behind.

Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, 2010
Single channel video projection (mute)

A funeral is a very personal act, a way of parting from someone, yet there is also a communal side: a formal ritual that gives a structure to the occasion. In this work I put emphasis on the distance to the occasion that is caused by the formalities around it.

The video shows a ritual that is performed by a group of six men of several generations. The group gathers around a Persian rug. After looking at it for a while they slowly kneel down, roll it up and march it away. The men’s costumes look formal, but are clearly uniforms, which refer to the ritual as merely a routine. In this ritual, the same time is taken as for a ritual at a funeral and the object is handled with the same care as a coffin. However, the ritual has been stripped of any expression of emotion. Nor is there any sign of a goal: the viewer is being left behind when the group marches on to a field and disappears behind a heap of sand.

Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, 2010
Installation
Materials: Staircase, tree, two timber poles, two plastic bags

With ‘Flag Bearer’ I focus on the meaning of an exhibition space. How do the politics of exhibiting function? What does it mean to put something on display?

The exhibition space lies 1.80 meter underneath the ground level outside. Inside is a tree hanging at that level. The windowsill is made accessible by a staircase; it activates a space that is not commonly used. By climbing the stairs the public has a view on a grass field behind the academy. The viewer, pressed against the window, now experiences the outside as being on display. The nearest tree to the window is similar in size and form to the tree inside. The viewer is standing exactly at the middle point between the two trees; one of which every detail is controlled and that is carefully displayed. And one that is ‘out there’, alive, with a plastic bag hanging from a branch that is frenetically dancing in the wind.