This exhibition by Gioia de Bruijn, on view in Amsterdam, is made up of personal images and black and white photographs of streets and buildings. A visual cacophony of city-scapes, airports, skyscrapers, party people, tramps and junkies. Between straightforwardness and sensitivity. And text, lots of text, written on small slips.
It is important to Gioia de Bruijn that we understand her thoughts. To represent her inner world, her photographs are both individually as collectively her instrument. Such as the photograph of herself naked and angry in her bathtub. Or another self-portrait in which she pulls off her T-shirt at a window in front of a catholic church. An unemployed Indian man from Nevada who just voted for President Trump (I am voting for Trump give me five Navajo Indian reservation). A brothel next to a gas station (Alien cat girls brothel, Death Valley, 2016). An unmade bed in Antwerp (Bed, Antwerp, 2016). Two people hanging out of a window in an apartment in a suburb of Lyon. (Dudes by the window, 2016).
Some 40 photographs are exhibited in the show. Buildings, people, things; giving us no clear meaning or informational value. In her black and white series Empty Cities (2010 – ongoing) the skyscrapers with their seemingly endless glazing walls are compositions with high angles that offer us a micro-world where the passage of time and the intensity of the sound is different. Even in her raw photographs which she named Weekend Warriors (2009 – 2016), De Bruijn looks beyond the merely documentary significance to grasp the comprehensive. De Bruijn integrates herself in a documentary of her own life eliminating any voyeurism. The friends in this series look stoically in her lens, stoned, stuffed with pills, sloshed, but assured of themselves, to the point of arrogance, in what is often a third or fourth day of an after-party. Their glances are penetrating, almost accusatory. “Why fuck the world”?.
Gioia de Bruijn, Sound is different from noise
18 March – 22 April, 2017
Flatland Gallery
Lijnbaansgracht 314
1017 TD Amsterdam
Holland
