Tim van den Oudenhoven is a Belgian-born artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. His photo-based depictions of desolate landscapes with a strong suggestion of surveillance inspire conversations on the dynamic between the visible and the invisible, the witness and the witnessed: in brief, the nature of being seen.
Tansy Xiao: You have a background in Linguistics, has the idea of languages had any impact on your art making, or are they two separate territories?
Tim van den Oudenhoven: When I started studying art, after completing my MA in English & Swedish, I was convinced of finding ways to combine language and images, though as I started to produce more, specifically inspired by some of my favorite works of literature (notably House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski), I felt the use of language limiting when it came to the interpretation of visual art. Text has the inherent danger of reducing works of visual art into illustrations, which detracts the viewers from the visual experience. In that sense, language and art have become two separate territories indeed.
Tansy Xiao: The absence or erasing of human traces seems to be a predominant character in the majority of your photographic work. In your latest Surveillancescapes series it seems almost contradictory, as surveillance devices are often designed to capture human activities, or something less static. What’s the relationship between the idea of surveillance and those desolate landscapes?
Tim van den Oudenhoven: Erasing and vanishing of human activity are indeed important elements in my work. One could see it as a reflection on Memento Mori, though on a larger scale, not reduced to the individual, but encompassing all physical and social structures. When I am working and I get stuck, I take a few minutes to zoom out of myself, visualizing my position from above my home, zooming out into space farther and farther until I see my infinitesimally small position in the entire universe. It is this insignificance that inspires me to move on and create something rather than nothing, though I understand that for many, this realization would have the opposite effect.
Ever since my performance piece Chris-Winston.com, I have been interested in the theme of surveillance. There, I used it to provide an alternate reality to the photographs that were taken of each tableau: the photographs were taken with a large format camera, giving them excruciating detail but also a fake, staged appearance. The security camera, with its strong pixelation and grainy resolution, was much more believable than those photographs.
With Surveillancescapes, a series of found footage stills of undefined winter landscapes, there is a sense that the security cameras’ only use is to preserve the status quo. It could easily be imagined that an alarm would go off once somebody dared to drive on that road, so in that sense this series is also about erasing the human presence. Even in these desolate landscapes, they are about control. To enhance their effect, the stills are presented as “screens”, either in light boxes or in frames using the same 16:9 aspect ratio of TV screens.
Tansy Xiao: Compared to filling the entire surface of a space with details, which is what Horror Vacui art often implies, your Horror Vacui series centers the actual horror of the empty space. The Troieshchyna series before that already showed signs of reduction and vacancy, however such imagery peaked at Horror Vacui. Could you talk about the process of their creation?
Tim van den Oudenhoven:
Троєщина – Troieshchyna
“Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.” (JG Ballard, High-Rise)
Ever since my graduation series disparitions (very black urban landscapes printed on newsprint paper), I have been working with urban landscapes where the horizon is rendered absent. Троєщина (Troieshchyna) is a suburb of Kiev, Ukraine, and when I was wandering around there (one of those places where locals ask you, “Why on earth would you go there?”), I was overwhelmed by the brutalist architecture from the Soviet era, just endless rows of apartment blocks, housing thousands of people, hiding them for the sake of efficiency. Here, the outline of the apartment block does provide a kind of horizon, though what lies beyond is invisible. The overwhelming presence obscures the view and render one’s perception of the landscape incomplete.
In this series, you see huge chunks taken out of the buildings, turning parts of it into islands and at the same time making the flat image visually similar to the outlook of a map. This concept of creating little islands is also reflected in Horror Vacui.
Horror Vacui
“When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. (…) There are fierce attitudes on the horizon. One inhales the effluvia of the great black void.” (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables)
In Horror Vacui, the process of deletion is taken a step further, even though the deletions here were achieved by the dead of night, rather than by post-processing. I started this series when I was doing an art residency in Iceland. The sense of solitude could be very intense, certainly when driving around at night. I started focusing on these little man-made islands of light sparsely scattered across the nightly landscape.
As with Троєщина – Troieshchyna, there is a sense of isolation, but in this case, there is only a black void around it. Horror Vacui in art is indeed used to fill every part of a canvas with meaning, though in my series, this fear of the void is taken a step further. Black contains both everything and nothing, which in both cases can cause existential doubt. It is a color of negation, but in my view also of creation: in order to make sense of the image and the black surface, one has to fill in the landscape in order to make sense of it.
With the use of this amount of black space, printed with copious amounts of black ink on the most matte paper I could find to enhance the darkness, I draw the analogy with the Pale Blue Dot photograph the Voyager 1 spacecraft took of Earth from a distance of 6 billion kilometers, a little island of light in a sea of darkness.
Tansy Xiao: The Perpetuals series has a strong reminiscence of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s filmmaking, for whom human characters were also abstracted and generalized, oppressed by the overwhelming quality of something ethereal and symbolic, especially through the scenes that were shot from afar. Were you trying to achieve such psychological effects?
Tim van den Oudenhoven: Yes, totally. There is a tragic, yet also darkly comical touch to this oppression. In Perpetuals, one or more actions are repeated indefinitely, which can be seen as an allegory of a daily routine. When the high-rise building appears, it can take a little while to see any action taking place. And then you spot it: an action repeated incessantly by an indistinguishable person in a sea of apartment units. She comes out, puts something in the trash, she goes back inside. Repeat.
Another film director I could reference here whose work definitely inspired this is Swedish film director Roy Andersson, who depicts the human condition with this type of tragicomic realism. As with Zvyagintsev, the characters are often unable to escape their realities. The distance from the subject definitely plays a vital role here, because the static frame is then used as a makeshift prison, with limited options to escape.
Tansy Xiao: Characterizing the disempowerment of humankind, you’ve often utilized your own body in your performances as subjects of humiliation and deprivation. Was the Chris Winston series inspired by the human trafficking on the Darknet? Is it more of a sacred sacrifice: by definition, the act of giving up something in order to get something else in return, or the mere representation of what is called “low life”?
Tim van den Oudenhoven: In the performances where I used my body, I used it as a vehicle to be subjected to outside influences. When I made it back in 2009, the reference to the Darknet was not so direct on the first version of the website. The website itself only contained videos and the narrative there contradicted the narratives provided by the photographs (which looked very staged) and the other one provided by Chris’ own writings. In the security camera footage on the website, you see Chris being attacked (or self-harming) in a room that is being transformed with each episode. Little context is given apart from the text that Chris is in captivity and visitors can bid on killing him.
The reference to the Darknet became more prominent after an update of the amateurishly programmed website. Funnily enough, 6 years after the project was put online and mostly forgotten by me, I noticed a huge rise in traffic to the website. Some YouTuber had stumbled across it and concluded this had to be a clearnet version of a Darknet website and many of his followers agreed. Even though a simple WhoIs search could have revealed the background behind the project, the thousands of comments and e-mails the site received finally achieved what the original goal was: to at least have its visitors doubt the reality that is shown. Some commenters even claimed to have reported it to the FBI, but given the fact that I was able to visit the US after that without being stopped at the border, I am sure the FBI didn’t think I’d be a threat to anyone but myself.
Tansy Xiao: Do you think it’s important for an artist to use their own body, compared to if they employ other performers’ bodies in a piece? Putting aside the potential moral controversies. Does the presence of the artist’s own flesh create the aura?
Tim van den Oudenhoven: I think it was important to be involved myself.
When I planned the Chris Winston series, there was never any doubt that I would have to be him, because I had gotten bored with the photography I had been taking up until that point. A series I did before that involved a lot of staged photography covering the same themes of disappearance/alienation/uncanny experiences I generally always work with, and when I was working with models/performers, there was something fake about it and I found the results ultimately unsatisfying. This is why the use of the surveillance camera became so pivotal. I needed to be fully immersed in the experience to be able to move on with the medium of photography.
Tansy Xiao: Please talk about your recent exhibitions and some new projects that you’re working on.
Tim van den Oudenhoven: In June 2019, I had a solo show at the Copenhagen Photo Festival, where I exhibited my Horror Vacui series in combination with a special light box version of the Surveillancescapes series that were activated by motion sensors and only revealed their images when they were triggered. The light boxes were also interconnected, so any trigger could activate a number of light boxes; this was done to steer the viewer along the exhibition, and thus willingly being guided by a software program.
In July 2019, I installed four large scale portraits from my Transparence series printed on tracing paper in the beautiful Palazzo Riso, the contemporary art museum in Palermo, Italy. The prints float along with the draught. They share similarities with passport photographs, but are more ephemeral. This exhibition called Shifting Stances is ongoing until Dec. 2nd, 2019.
In September, I was part of a group show “The Infinite Wheel of Time” for the collective Young Blood Initiative, where I showed large scale banners and two video works.
I just got back from Munich from a solo show at DIA, where I showed my Shattered Land series (a reinterpretation of the photography done in the 1930s in commission of the Farm Security Administration in the US) in combination with my Surveillancescapes series. Currently I am showing a large format landscape from my Coordinates photo series in a group show “SPEKTRUM” that is ongoing until Nov. 2nd, 2019.
As for my new projects, I am working on a series of artificial, abstract urban landscapes, designed in CAD software and 3D printed and subsequently photographed. I like the idea of combining these digital procedures with old analog printing techniques, so I am experimenting with Van Dyke prints, toned cyanotypes, and other liquid photo emulsions. Another project I am working on is to use my own family archives (which includes photographs, letters, court documents, lists) and apply my themes of deletion and erasing on them, to see how much could be deleted to turn this personal history into a more universal one.
This year, I also expanded the publishing house StudiO TvdO which I started last year and published its first photo book for a Munich photographer, two upcoming ones are scheduled for 2020. The project also aims to support artists whose aesthetics fit in with my own and the idea is to organize group shows and events starting next year.
But first, I desperately need to clean up my studio.
