My work
The question ‘Who or what am I?’ is on going. It seems to be a personal but also universal search resulting in staged situations and activities that throw the question and possible propositions to myself and propably to the observer.
The work appears as installations, videos, photographs and performances in specific places, often outside in landscape situations, but also in galleries and art spaces.
Roles and characters introduce themselves while working on projects. The identification with these characters expand my universe, and introduces possibilities that I (as Arjen, and who is that?) would never be able to consider. Aware of (autobiographic) stories and memories and being sensible to actualities, ideas pop up and give rise to different outcomes in different media.
Having my projects sometimes on the edge of being recognized as art is an exciting place to be.
With landscape projects like Antarctic Potato Eater (a quest to take a fry shack to Antarctica and bake fries over there), Boerstra Engineering (the company I founded to be undercover as an artist) evaluating e.g. the abuse of our soil, people look from an authentic perspective and are able to have an unprejudiced and fresh point of view.
Bringing the search into an art space redefines the possibilities and ways of expressing. At that point the possibilities of the artwork are explored from within seeming assumptions and beliefs held in artificial environments. It is explored in representation, installation and performance.
It could be exciting to have me on your doorstep.
Arjen Boerstra