ABSURD OFFICE SCENES
Isabelle Wenzel (b. 1982, Germany) photographs women in the most impossible positions. They hang upside down in a corner, contort like acrobats, stick their high-heeled legs out of homemade cardboard constructions. Their faces don’t matter. Wenzel turns the female body into an object, and in doing so gives the viewer a disquieting feeling.
Wenzel’s absurd, wryly comic photographs stood out at the final exam presentation at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Even before that, however, at the urging of adviser Willem van Zoetendaal, the Virtual Museum Zuidas had invited Wenzel to participate in the Virtual Zoom photography project, in which young artists seek an interaction with the Zuidas.
Wenzel bicycled and walked through the area, discovering that the Zuidas was so focused on order and neatness that it gave an artificial impression. In order to claim space for imperfection – and thereby lessen the distance between the built environment and herself as a human being – she fashioned a model of her own Zuidas, using tape and pieces of discarded cardboard that she found in the area. Her cardboard metropolis might be melancholic and unstable, but it’s also organic and human.
After the district, she went to the office of a multinational, taking a model and some props. ‘I have never worked in an office and found it fascinating to see how functional and minimal the movements of people are in such a space,’ says Wenzel during the setting up of her solo exhibition at the KunstKapel. ‘People sit on their chairs, look at their monitors and communicate with their neighbours by computer, even the ones who are sitting next to them. It made me wonder how long I could keep sitting still like that.” Judging by the tormented office photos, some of which were made on the spot and some later in the studio, Wenzel, who was trained as an acrobat as a child, would not be able to keep sitting still for long. In filmic office scenes, chaos and pointless movements take over. Stacks of paper fly through the air or balance on people’s heads or their behinds.
Garbed in colourful skirts and stockings, women’s legs sprawl under a desk, disguise themselves as a floor lamp or dangle nonchalantly over a desk chair. The photos are as hilarious as they are disconcerting.
The experience of working outside the studio, with the public close at hand, made a big impression, says Wenzel, both on herself and the onlookers. ‘During the photo shoot, people stood in front of the windows, waved, whooped and filmed it with their phones. It was an inspiring break from their daily work routine.’
It’s unclear where her career will go next, but in any case she wants to stay in the Netherlands. ‘In Germany, the art scene is more focused on the past; in the
Netherlands it’s about the future. I like that.’
The exhibition ‘Building Images, photography and installations by Isabelle Wenzel’, is on view in the KunstKapel, Prinses Irenestraat 19, Amsterdam Zuidas, through 7 November. Info: www.virtueel-museum.nl
Also see: ‘Building Images KunstKapel’ on You Tube
Since 2002, for the photography project Virtual Zoom, Virtual Museum Zuidas annually invites young artists to photograph the Zuidas as they see fit. The external advisor for the project is Willem van Zoetendaal. Previous participants include Risk Hazekamp, Gabor Ösz, Katja Mater, Marijn de Jong, Popel Coumou, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky and Shinji Otani. In April 2008, the entire collection, including all future work, was handed over to Amsterdam photography museum FOAM, where it forms the beginnings of a permanent collection. In its diversity, the collection gives both an idea of developments in the Zuidas and the current state of affairs in photography.
