Anouk Kruithof
Anouk Kruithof
Anouk Kruithof’s multilayered, trans-disciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, artist-books, text, performance, video, animation, websites and (social) interventions in the public domain.
Kruithof’s work is an exploration of contemporary life. By continually navigating between the digital and physical sphere, she investigates a collective state of mind that is not solely grounded in the material world, but more and more often in the relentless flow of images in an amorphous digital world.
Her work contemplates a world consisting of a relentless stream of edited, constructed, spliced-together images that have lost their credibility; exposing contemporary reality as thoroughly scripted and subject to permanent post-production. Her work depicts the transience and the chaos of this world, which the artist skillfully addresses by mixing urgent societal issues with personal experiences that simultaneously represent this prevalent state in our society today.
Born 1981 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Anouk Kruithof, lives and works between Brussels Belgium, the Netherlands and her wooden house in the Amazon Rainforest in Botopasi Suriname. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as: Musuem Tinguely Basel, MoMA New York and MoMA San Fransisco, Museum Folkwang Essen, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, Museum Voorlinden Wassenaar, FOAM Amsterdam, Kunst Haus Wien Vienna, VOO?UIT Ghent, MBAL Le Locle Switzerland, The Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen China; Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, Russia.
Universal Tongue
In the large-scale research project Universal Tongue (2018 - 2021), the Dutch artist Anouk Kruithof analyzes dance as a global cultural phenomenon, through the exploration of videos and clips found on the internet. With her team of fifty-two researchers and assistants, she has been able to compile 8,800 films representing the diversity of cultures through dance. The ongoing loop of moving image erases typical categories of the world order, such as country, continent or culture. Instead, it looks at our era of fluidity, hybridity, and non-stop connectedness, respecting the value of our historical backgrounds, cultural differences, and individuality.
The installation version of the work, consisting of 8 four-hour videos projected simultaneously, has been shown around the world and recently at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. At TULCA, we present the new four-hour monoband video of Universal Tongue.
Image: Anouk Kruithof, Universal Tongue, 2022, video-edition 12 + 2 ap, video loop with sound, 4hrs duration. Edit with Ieva Maslinskaitė. Sound with Karoliina Pärnänen. Photo: Ros Kavanagh