To enter a world of ‘copying’ is an extremely fragile environment. Being in China and seeing a whole entire mass of reproduction of existing western products, is for poor people a paradise, for rich people a shock. I refreshed my knowledge of films with buying the cheap illegal copies. Through the errors on the DVD, ‘the persistence of vision’ is interrupted and reveals a visual puzzle of stacked frames. Soon I realized this fast consumption of low quality open up a new direction of seeing the aesthetic in art.

The sport section in Newspaper is actually very fascinating. Athletes are in a contour of sharpness, no token of the speed that they are. The shutter speed is set at the smallest to deliver us with details of a sharp body. I complete the circle of bringing them back into movement whilst I shift my camera.

Newspaper photographs living a short life and are there to illustrate. The newspaper is the easiest and the cheapest thing to consume. I stop the cycle of fast consumption by using the newspaper photograph and using it as a permanent object. I use a newsprint paper stencil with several frames to build my own story. Where the eye wanders between the frames and brings it into a semiotic relationship, the photographs are dismantled from the seriousness of representing news and are turned into visual puns.

While I worked on the images I felt like a painter covering the image and painting over that line and this shape. At the other hand I am a film director producing a storyboard or a criminal records officer searching for any hint in the image.

MA Fine Art Class is a group portrait of 43 individuals. For this series Veronika Spierenburg (b. 1981) was inspired by the new sensation of seeing the world through photographs that for example the first aerial images by Nadar brought to the nineteenth century audience. Exploring analogue photography as a means to transform the human body into abstract shapes and textures, she began photographing her classmates from Central Saint Martins College in London. The result is a series of images taken from an unusual angle -each person is photographed from above, so that only the top of their head and shoulders can be seen- that considers the role of photography as a means to portray one's identity.

Spierenburg's photographs show what a person looks like. In this sense they are similar to passport photos: they provide basic biometric information such as hair colour, shoulder breadth and skull size. But is a portrait still a portrait when distinctive facial features are not visible? Spierenburg's answer to this question would seem to be a definite 'yes'. Yet still, there is a tension. Like the portraits made by Thomas Ruff in the mid 1980s where all his subjects stare blankly into the lens, the people in Spierenburg's photos offer the viewer no sense of their emotional state. What is left are physical signs and textures that offer small clues about a persons gender and over-all appearance. The shaping of their identity is a guessing game in which the viewer makes a mental reconstruction of the whole. What we know shapes what we see and vice versa. And that is where the fun begins. Looking at the world from above on Google Earth isn't so appealing because we see things from a new perspective. It's because it allows us to test and expand what we know about our car, the house we grew up in or the next-door neighbours garden. MA Fine Art Class offers that same dialectical experience in which the vain voyeur in all of us starts to wonder how the length of our own noses or our receding hairlines would look like from this perspective, especially when compared to those of the people in the pictures.

But if we look beyond the first grey hairs, glasses, hairclips and the clothes that cover their shoulders, we see a group of 43 people, uniformly photographed in a way that vaguely reminds of Communist propaganda. As the title of the work suggests, this is a new wave of young artists, photographed in a typological 'sameness' that none of them must have felt at the time they shared a class at Central Saint Martins College. Spierenburg's work reduces these individuals to the size of a doll standing ready to leave their training ground, while in fact they were right in the middle of preparing for their graduation show, the ultimate start of their individual careers. The symbolic power of photography is all too evident here. Separated by a frame, each of these artists is represented by what makes them unique. And perhaps that is what going to an art academy is all about: learning to express your individual self in the form of art.

Wouter den Bakker

‘Marks on the wall’ is an observation of the Chinese art student while they attend drawing lessons at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
I was intrigued by their constant head movement, their sharp eyes and their own childlike appearance. The video piece is a fixed-camera-view of close-ups of their faces and their surrounding objects, showing drawings forgetful in the corner, a paper plane hanging from the ceiling, photographs on the chairs, stickers and marks on the wall.

The experience of somebody cutting your hair, washing your face, cleaning your ears is thrown back to childhood where you are dependent on adults. It is a spiritual treatment where the customer can quietly think or becoming thoughtless. The visual focus is on the contrast of relaxed customer faces and the swift movements of the barber’s hands, pointing out an intimate gesture in the transformation of hair.
The focus of the video lies on the street barbers in China. I used a close up view of customer faces to cut out information of the immediate place. Thereby sound is an important factor in the presence of the audience’s blindness of the surroundings. Cars roar, bicycles passing by, people talk, a person sings interweaved with sound of scissor cuts and sound of water.

The photograph is a silent object, static in its own timeless zone, totally motionless clutched to the wall. What does it mean to bring a considered movement back into a single image? Does the content of the image accept the impact of movement and glide towards an illusion? Filming a single photograph is reflecting the notion of film; without the invention of photography there wouldn’t be film. The process of the work is implicated in three different layers: from the viewer to the film, from the film to the photo, from the photo to the subject.

A narrative notion is added to photographs through simple gestures of liquids, candles and a hair dryer: Under circumstances of optical illusion, the old ‘Dungeon Ghyll’ hotel begins to burn, the blossoms of a cherry tree rock in the wind and fog appears by the bridge. The colored images are used from the founded picture book of ‘The Lake District’ of Great Britain from 1961.