Can language present itself in a different guise? This question is a common thread in the work of Sanne van Balen (1994). After graduating in Dutch language and literature, she went on to study Image & Language at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Her artworks focus on the visual experience of language, while her writings give images a voice. For her work at Prospects, Van Balen is zooming in on the tongue. On the one hand, the tongue is a muscle that shapes and literally creates language. On the other, ‘tongue’ also refers to the language we speak, the language of a people. This duality is a recurring feature in her work.
Lying in the grass outside of the Van Nellefabriek is the work Stem (2024), a red, meandering sculpture somewhat resembling a physical tongue. Inside, Van Balen is showing Landschriften (2024), an abstract, rustic-looking four-part painting from which the outside sculpture seems to have evolved. It then becomes clear that Van Balen is playing an ambiguous game, as those who consider her painter’s handwriting a language, will also recognize a two-dimensional handwriting in the three-dimensional tongue. The work also connects language to the landscape. To Van Balen, the landscape is a linguistic site that both contains and conveys the environment’s meanings. This makes it an important starting point for her work, resulting in a continuous interaction between landscapes, words and images. It attempts to visualize the poetry in language while simultaneously adding a new layer of meaning to it.
Text: Esther Darley
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang