Roos van Haaften
LIGHT WORKS | Re-Risch-Lau
Photography
BTV Stadtforum Innsbruck
Eintritt frei
BTV Stadtforum Innsbruck
Eintritt frei
Forming a picture
The second sensation you get when looking at Roos van Haaften’s pictures is amazement. Amazement in the moment you realise that her magical light images are created solely from the shadow cast on the wall by meticulously arranged waste materials. With her alpine landscapes, the artist references the great romantic image while at the same time providing its making-of.
In her works, she addresses the illusion that photography creates: on the one hand, its ability to designate a concrete place at a specific time, its capacity to both inform and emotionally touch. On the other hand, her projections lead us inwards, to where all images originate. To our ability to imagine, to form a picture of something.
Holiday greetings from Tyrol and Vorarlberg
As part of the INN SITU series, photographers take a closer look at the Tyrol/Vorarlberg region. In this context, the Dutch artist discovered the postcards produced by the Risch-Lau publishing house. Founded by two female pioneers of portrait photography at the end of the 19th century, with locations in Bregenz, Innsbruck and Salzburg the company shaped the image of the Alpine mountain world in thousands and thousands of images until the 1980s. The estate of the female photographer dynasty with around 40,000 pictures is now in the Vorarlberg State Library. Roos van Haaften spent months recreating about a dozen of them.
Beauty incl. operating manual
Images of images. Visual reconstructions that cast shadowy images on the wall like a fading echo, an image from a dream just barely captured, the fading memory of the sublime peak, the quaint mountain village, the overwhelming rock face. Sculpture as an imaging process, as a school of seeing.
Roos van Haaften’s works seem to be descendants of Arte Povera, seeking to rebuild a sinking world through the reuse of the cheapest materials. Her exhibition is a chapel of contemplation and enlightenment. With luminous windows behind which we glimpse our own landscapes of the soul, while at the same time perceiving the artist’s mastery of craftsmanship and her transparent interplay with shadows. Beauty incl. operating manual.
Her work for INN SITU was newly created for the BTV Stadtforum and is the artist’s first exhibition in Austria.
Roos van Haaften
Born in 1983, lives and works in Amsterdam. The beginning of her artistic work was marked by an exploration of text and performance and a study of the so-called fourth wall, the creation of theatrical illusion through stage sets. She studied Visual Arts at the ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design in Arnhem as well as at the University of the Arts in London. Her light installations hover between the boundaries of sculpture, photography and drawing. In addition to her studio work, she designs site-specific projects in public spaces. In 2018, Roos van Haaften was nominated for the Fotomuseum Winterthur’s “Plat(t)form” of outstanding young artists. Most recently, her works have been shown at venues including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Garage Rotterdam or Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf.