The Studio #7: Minne Kersten

The Studio provides a platform for small-scale solo presentations, in which artists give an account of recent developments in their work

10 December 2022 – 4 June 2023

In the last month of the year, Bonnefanten opens its seventh
edition of The Studio. In this studio presentation, Minne
Kersten (1993, Utrecht) exhibits the installation The Same
Room, a hidden room in which she explores how human
emotions are interwoven with architectural spaces. The Studio
provides a platform for small-scale solo presentations, in which
artists give an account of recent developments in their work.

Emotional connection to
architecture

In the installation The Same Room, Minne Kersten explores the
connection between a bedroom as a physical structure and the
personal memories associated with this space. Kersten is
specifically interested in how that space changes when
something traumatic has taken place there. She staged a
bedroom in a film set she created herself, which came into
contact with the element water.

The water-damaged room is quiet, yet bears witness to the
fact that something has happened there. Through an
installation, paintings and a sculpture, Kersten offers different
perspectives for looking at the bedroom. For instance, the
concept of water has various meanings. For one person, water
is a destructive force, while for another it is life-giving. As a
visual artist with literary inclinations, Kersten is always
searching for how suggestive images are experienced and
interpreted, and how this is influenced by personal and cultural
associations.

The memory of architectural
spaces

There are no people in any of the artworks in The Same Room.
Together, the bedroom, the objects in it and the water tell the
story of the people who left it all behind like that – through the
memory of the architectural space. In The Same Room, Kersten
not only offers changing perspectives by using different media,
but she also gives multi-layered interpretations of a story.

Minne Kersten

Minne Kersten graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie
(Amsterdam) in 2016 and participated in De Ateliers
(Amsterdam) in 2018-2020. In 2022, she was nominated for the
Royal Award for Modern Painting and the Volkskrant Fine Art
Award, and was selected for a residency with Triangle-
Astérides (Marseille, France).

The Studio #7: Minne Kersten is on show until 4 June 2023.

Note for the press: for a press preview, more information and visual material, please contact Debbie Jans through pressoffice@bonnefanten.nl or 0031 (0)6 22 29 01 84.