The Kreuzberg district gallery presents a retrospective of Dutch photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra. Large-scale works and video installations document the periods of life when identity is shaped, spanning more than three decades.
Rigor is what is immediately apparent in Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits when we observe them, one after the other, crossing time, together. A frontal approach and finely worked compositions link the eight series presented together. One of the most famous being that of her portraits taken on various beaches around the world during the 90s. In Ukraine, Poland, the United States and the Netherlands, the images appear as a study of the passage from childhood to adulthood. Rineke Dijkstra photographs these adolescents according to an immutable method: standing, with the sea in the background and the horizon located at the level of the hips of the subject(s). If the frame of the portraits remains essentially the same, the final rendering always seems to be given over to the moods of the sky and the sea.
The undeniable echo of Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits with certain works, or at least certain motifs, by the great masters of painting has often been highlighted. Here, Venus is a young adolescent girl in a green swimsuit, with a posture – the contrapposto – that corresponds to that of Botticelli’s goddess. What is troubling in these resonances between Dijkstra’s photographs and painting is the part of staging assumed by the artist and the part left to chance. She says it herself: “Tracing never works.” And it’s true: when you’re trying to copy, how can you convey the authentic power of certain emotions? This young adolescent, all by herself, exudes a palette of emotions made touching by the details – the irregularity of her skin tone, the sand stuck to her feet – that the large format allows to reveal.
Another series that particularly marks Rineke Dijkstra’s career is Almerisa, a Bosnian child whom the artist began photographing in 1994, after her parents fled the war in Yugoslavia. This first encounter in a refugee center in the Netherlands marked the beginning of a series that continues to this day. Dijkstra has forged a bond with her subject, whom she has photographed approximately every two years since, according to the same principle: in a neutral setting, sitting on a chair. A chair that evolves over time, just like Almerisa, whom we follow through her major life transitions. Before our eyes, the little Bosnian girl asserts herself, she becomes a young woman and then a mother. About this series, Almerisa Sehric confides in an interview conducted at the Guggenheim “the chair changes, it becomes more and more beautiful, since the plastic chair on which Rineke first photographed me.”
The exhibition also presents her famous park series, from Tiergarten in Berlin — made in the late 90s as part of a residency in Berlin — to Vondelpark in Amsterdam, where each image bears witness to the passage to adolescence of young people from this or that country. If the artist is part of the tradition of portraiture — with all the demands that it includes — she makes something unique out of it, pierced with realism and humanity.
This is how we find ourselves faced with these large portraits of women, captured a few hours or days before giving birth, with a newborn in their arms and blood running down their legs. These rare images show in a single instant the broad spectrum of emotions that emerge from a moment as powerful as the birth of a child for a mother. And Rineke Dijkstra thus pays a precious (and necessary) tribute to them.
From the discreet, insidious, sometimes silent and despised upheavals; to those that we see, and those that we do not see, Rineke Dijkstra restores their dignity and importance. Armed with her large-format 4×5 film camera, she stages head-on, in a light that is alternately cold and natural, the insecurities, anxieties and all the troubles that make us. A slow, thoughtful and limited modus operandi that has never left her, since her beginnings when it was the only way to obtain the desired sharpness. And faced with the immediacy of which photography is today a victim, her practice has a singular echo, allowing us to see the world on a grand scale, with eyes wide open.
Noémie de Bellaigue
Rineke Dijkstra at the Berlinische Galerie until February 10, 2025.
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124 – 128
10969 Berlin
https://berlinischegalerie.de
