Lot Essay
Barbara Visser's work deals with the uncertain relationship between recording and dramatizing questions of history and its possible representations. Images and texts included in her work are merely vessels for "future memories." Their shape and appearance alter the content of what was once worth remembering. The ambiguity of particular codes and systems within the images, sounds and text employed in her work challenges the viewer to reconsider ingrained ways of perceiving the world. Barbara Visser lives and works in Brussels and Amsterdam. She studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Cooper Union in New York and at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. Since 1992 her work is exhibited in well-known museums, institutes and galeries in the Netherlands and abroad; among others at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Contemporary Art Center of Vilnius (Lithuania), the Paviljoens in Almere, the Muhka Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the Bro Friedrich in Berlin, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, and the São Paulo Art Biennial. Barbara Visser has been granted several awards, such as the Charlotte Køohler award (1996), the Prix Jeune Peinture Belge (1999), the Friedrich Gildenwart-Vordemberge Preis (2000), the David Roll Award (2007) and the Dr. A.H. Heineken-prize (2008). In 2006, Barbara Visser's work was shown at Witte de With as part of the group exhibition Life, Once More.