“I would like to be working with mentees that have a varied and experimental approach. I am interested in following the process of creating work and supporting a mentee’s development through active listening and encouragement. I very much believe in thinking through making. I live in London and therefore will only be able to mentor online.”
About Saskia Olde Wolbers (1971, Breda)
I have made 13 short narrative videos and 3 public art video works and 1 site-specific sound installation with Artangel.
In the narrative videos, off-screen narrators address the fluidity of fact through biographies relating to notions of translation with an eye for wit and the absurd. My fictional narratives are based on oral histories coming from unheard perspectives. My protagonists have been a postman who discovers a house where Vincent van Gogh once lived, an eccentric marine Oil-spill responder, a fake doctor and his mistress and a child living at the bottom of a hydro-dam lake.
Referencing computer-generated imagery, the liquid imagery is entirely analogue, filmed in real time in my studio, and subvert the truth-telling qualities of filming reality. Wire-frame objects are given a skin when dipped in paint and submerged underwater. Materials are animated through this unpredictable confrontation of oil paint and water.
In my most recent works I have blended this visual style with footage shot on location, archival material and sonar imagery.
I am currently filming in a miniature version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 rotating set; A wheel where the set and the camera are tracking the same circular motion. Heat shaped fabrics forming architecture, animals and abstract life forms, are animated underwater in this analogue Soft-robotic simulator, referencing autonomous object-hood and the possibility of AI.
The work has been shown extensively in galleries, museums, talks, symposia, festivals and the public sphere in the UK and abroad. It is held in museum collections such as The Hirshhorn Washington DC, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the South London Gallery Collection and has won several prizes such as The Baloise price, Art Basel (2003), The Becks Futures Award (2004) the London Artists’ Film and Video Award, Film London (2007) and the Breathing Space Award (2016).
Recent shows include; Kino Der Kunst 2020, Beating Around the Bush #6, The Bonnefanten Museum 2020, Cartographies of the Imagination, London, 2020, Unreliable Biographers, Van Gogh House, London 2019, Women’s work, Morley Gallery 2018, Known Unknowns, Saatchi Gallery 2018, Phantom Limb, Fries Museum 2018, Telling Tales, Liao Jiekai and Saskia Olde Wolbers, Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai, 2018 Stedelijk Base, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2018, Offshore Ferens Art gallery Hull 2017, Paratoxic Paradoxes, Benaki Museum, Athens 2017, Bio-Baroque Art Film Festival, 21st Century Museum of Contempory Art, Kanazawa, 2017
Art Unlimited, Basel 2015,Yes, These Eyes are The Windows, Artangel London 2014 and Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles 2015. The videos has been subtitled in 8 languages.