Introduction

Jury members Merel Bem, Juul Hondius, and Henk Wildschut selected five photographic graduation projects for the Steenbergen Stipendium 2021. The winner of the Steenbergen Stipendium 2021 is Laura Bouman with her project "Rust Roest" (Rest Rusts). The honorable mention goes to Vladimir Vidanovski.

Laura Bouman

Rust Roest
Laura Bouman spent her childhood surrounded by vehicles. Cars, motorbikes – she has never known a time when she, her friends or her family wasn’t driving in, riding on, or tinkering with moving machines, as if they were a technical extension of their own body parts. The stains on the floor and the carpet, the greasy fingerprints on doorknobs, and her father’s damaged hands constantly reminded her that the people around her spent every day working with machines and maintaining them, as she wrote in her thesis.

All that comes together in her final exam presentation, Rust Roest. With a thorough, yet playful and uncomplicated approach, Bouman researches the relationship between the human body and the vehicles that move us, both physically and mentally. Just as tinkering with engines and leaky exhaust systems engenders a curiosity for materials and their qualities, so Bouman experimented with different forms and ways to bring her story to light. The material, the work floor – you can almost smell it. Her work doesn’t only include photographs; she also presents drawings, photocopies, a video, and a motorcycle helmet made of soft plastic that was clearly made with loving care and attention. Her installation is a striking, larger-than-life and in-depth look at her fondness for the motorcycle and the close relationship she has with her father.

Julia Gat

Hamsa Hamsa Hamsa _ An Upbringing
From the moment you are drawn into the world of Julia Gat and her brothers and sisters as a spectator, you’re hooked. Gat presents a family life that – from a distance at least – seems wonderfully free and untroubled, evoking both feelings of tenderness and slight envy. Gat has been documenting her immediate surroundings since she was ten years old; she felt that she wanted to capture and immortalise the happiness she associated with that time. That led to a gold mine of images.

Through beautiful photographs, a book and a film made from a patchwork of home videos, Gat brings an ode to her childhood. Parents, grown-ups – their role is insignificant, except perhaps as the invisible forces that gave the playfulness and experimental behaviour of their children room to flourish. The first image in the book emphatically portrays them as a blurry image. Nonetheless, Gat’s dedication in her publication is explicitly addressed to them, which leads us to suspect that their role may have been greater than we think. Set against a background of sunny, exotic locations, we see a life that is marked by the uncomplicated multicultural identity and the appealing, Bohemian-like lifestyle of the ‘characters’. Together, they form an idyllic miniature society, removed from the big, bad, outside world.

Rick van der Klooster

The Day the Birds stopped Singing
What do you do when you’re young and you’re worried about the world? You can take to the streets and protest, but you can also make a photobook, as Rick van der Klooster has done. The project The Day the Birds Stopped Singing stems from a disquiet and anger at growing up on a planet that is slowly dying. That results in moody, contrast-rich black and white photographs that can sometimes easily be characterised as disconsolate – dark skies, weeping willows hanging their branches in the water, stuffed birds – and portraits of youths that gaze through binoculars against a backdrop of urban parks or pose next to burning birdhouses. And then there is the boy with numerous bricks hanging from his upper body.

The metaphors are telling. Still, at the end of the day, The Day the Birds Stopped Singing is not a bleak, cheerless project. There are birds, high up in the trees, where freedom beckons. Rays of sunshine peep through the canopy of leaves, there is light in the distance, and you can see the tenderness and a genuine sense of connection between the youths and their natural environment. And that, despite everything, gives hope for the future.

Vladimir Vidanovski

What are you looking for?
Vladimir’s Vidanovski’s installation is entitled What are your looking for? It’s a question that he posed primarily to himself as he, a self-declared ‘screen-based millennial’, sifted through a pile of videos from his youth for this final exam project. All those hours spent behind the computer screen ever since he was a little boy of about four years old, endlessly tweaking digital fantasy worlds, finally had its use. Fragments from those videos appear in his touchingly beautiful film.

With the help of traditional video techniques, Vidanovski recreated his parental home; it appears in view with jerky movements and blocky images. The ‘camera’ turns and comes to rest on a computer in an empty room. The video image of a young boy appears from the blue light coming from the screen. He wants to take his ‘audience’ with him on a journey through his daydreams.

Besides this very young, innocent, comical version of himself, there is another narrator: the artist who he has become today, looking back upon his childhood, knowing now that the war that broke out when Yugoslavia fell apart formed the backdrop to his growing up. The contrast is striking: on the one hand, the sugary sweet world of a young child growing up on American YouTube films (a world portrayed through a network of tiny screens that are part of the installation, showing images of old computer games and children’s television shows), and on the other hand the stifling reality found outside the safety of his home. This is also portrayed in the film in the form of dark, dystopian images. ‘I find myself surrounded by walls of forgotten memories,’ Vidanovski whispers.

Lilli Weinstein

Maskenfreiheit
Do you know what it feels like to disappear into a space? To be afraid to talk to strangers, because you know your face will blush and your palms will start to sweat? To be so shy that even everyday life is a challenge? Those are a couple of the questions that Lili Weinstein asks her audience in her project, Maskenfreiheit. Quite literally even: she hid letters in the park near her home, letters that contained these kinds of questions and an invitation for the finder to call her up and make an appointment. She hoped that the letters would be found, but at the same time hoped they wouldn’t. Because that meant that she would have to carry out her devised tasks with that stranger, such as: make intensive eye contact, put on funny voices, study each other’s faces, cry together, and so on. The horror.

Yet that is exactly what Weinstein did. And she documented the entire process. As a spectator, you are a witness to her work: walls were covered in a playful manner with photographs, drawings and notes, an overwhelming amount of evidence documenting the moments she crossed the boundaries of her extreme shyness. The documents hang, organised by task over and across each other, black and white photographs alternated with colour, and everything without bells and whistles – just there, as proof. They remind us of performances from the 1960s and 1970s where the functioning of the human body played a central role. The installation takes you past different moments in the process and portrays the fellow performers that Weinstein has gotten involved. It is thrilling, because it was thrilling; there’s no subtlety here. You suspect that the reality was even more intense, and that feeds our curiosity even more.