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.