“The image of the little dabbling duck catches me.
I’m looking out over an expanse of water and his upturned tush turns my landscape view around its axis by 90 degrees.
It’s like being jovially mooned, or being shown what category of thing belongs on this side of the water’s surface –
I’m just an ass here with the other asses.”
From May 30 until July 6 solo exhibition ‘Absolutely Never Sitting Duck’ is on view in gallery van Fanny Freytag, by Rijksakademie alumnus Annelies Kamen. The exhibition is curated by Jelmer Wijnstroom.
In the exhibition ‘Absolutely Never Sitting Duck’ Annelies Kamen presents an installation with new ceramics, video and print works. In her work Kamen plays with language and the power dynamics involved in joke-making. Her work often begins with autobiographical stories or myths, which she combines with research into pop and mass culture to understand how perceptions of what is 'real' are shaped and manipulated.
The structure for laying out a spread of decoy ducks is called a rig; it's used in hunting. Decoys can point out the boundaries between definitions of what is ‘real’ and what is not. The duck decoy is a construction meant to mimic the real, in order to destroy it; a tricky mirror and a deadly hoax. The presented works point out a thin line between what you could see as ‘real’ or ‘fake’, and sometimes the one seeps into the other, like the image of a Möbius strip. Or like a decoy duck is used to lure a real duck. On which side of the strip are we?
For inquiries, please click here
Annelies Kamen (1988) is an artist based in Berlin. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2011. And a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Her work has been exhibited internationally at, among others, the Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and fffriedrich in Frankfurt am Main. She was a 2018 fellow of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenproject, Berlin and a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam from 2021-2023.
