Saskia Olde Wolbers (Breda, 1971) lives and works in London and Amsterdam. She completed her training at Saint Martin School of Art & Design in London, Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Chelsea College of Arts & Design in London. Her videos have been exhibited at ‘Art Now Lightbox’, Tate Britain London, ‘Shine’, Booijmans van Beuningen and at The Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. This year, with two of her most recent films, ‘Interloper’ and ‘Placebo’, Olde Wolbers won the Baloise Basel Art Prize 2003, an award founded to honour emerging artists and galleries invited to take part in the Statement section of Art Basel.

Absurd tales
The exhibition in Museum Het Domein consists of four large-scale video projections. The visitor is sucked into a weird science-fiction world of outlandish landscapes and spaces. Although people are nowhere to be seen, there is a nevertheless a keen sense of movement. Sometimes the viewer seems to move through the filmic space, sometimes the space or landscape itself seems to move, or we catch a glimpse of peculiar moving organisms. In a neutral, monotone voice, often with a foreign accent, a narrator recounts the improbable, dramatic and absurd events he or she has experienced.

Way of working
Alert viewers will recognise everyday objects and waste material here and there; as the video continues, it becomes clear that the ‘stage set’ is a miniature space, animated with a bizarre dreamlike reality by how the camera is angled and moved. Where nowadays the computer is often used to create the most improbable images, Saskia Olde Wolbers generates her hallucinatory landscapes by ingeniously crafting precise scale models, and filming them using a miniature camera. It is an unusual example of craftsmanship in the digital age, bringing forth poetic images that engage our imagination. Rather than one illustrating the other, the visual reinforces the spoken and vice versa; in combination, they elicit emotions in the viewer, transporting him into the mood of the piece.

Inspiration
Saskia Olde Wolbers draws her inspiration partly from virtual reality, a technique that digitally reconstructs or mimics reality: visually, auditively and tangibly. What fascinates her most about this technique is its potential to create a space where fantasies, hallucinations and memories can be experienced – all distinct ingredients of her video work. The media is also another proven source of inspiration – not just the ‘quality’ media like newspapers, weeklies and TV and radio current affairs programmes, but gossip magazines and soaps. Saskia Olde Wolbers culls ideas from high and low media, distilling them into narratives and images through a lengthy process of writing and rewriting.
The exhibition in Het Domein will present the works: Interloper, Placebo, Day Glo and Kilowatt Dynasty. It is realised in collaboration with Kunsthalle Sint Gallen in Switzerland and will be on display there in February 2004.

A catalogue (price 30 euro) will accompany the exhibition.