Bart Prinsen

Background

About Bart Prinsen

My working field includes three-dimensional installations drawings, graphics, photographs, slides and experimental shorts. Since 2002, I’ve been focussing on multimedia installations. I’m mainly interested in lost spaces, the architecture of nooks and crannies, of areas both habitable and inhabitable and how these places, which are subject to a continuous state of sprawling chaos, lay bare an irrepressible thought pattern of structures, frames and pointers. The focus lies on the memories of such places and how they are stored in our brain as if they were blueprints, where they are then processed and eventually start to lead a life of their own, giving the original an entirely new meaning. The process of how recollections come into being and the way our memory works are undeniably part of redefining and transforming these reminiscences into an image. When researching how the memory works, the main question is how the images of our recollections, in interaction with those of perception, are created and up to which point we are aware of it. The limits of logical thought patterns are explored as well as being put to the test through the presence of unpredictable and unstable elements in this human habitat. Those unpredictable images of chaos, smoke and water among them, seem to be beyond grasp – in spite of the deepply-rooted human urge to create order. In my installations, I combine various media including film, photographs, slides, drawings and mechanical constructions to generate images through the projections of and on unstable matter such as smoke, water and sand. The installation can be perceived as an exclave of my memory through which you can walk, becoming physically aware of the space and filling it in with your own blueprints. Equally, the visitor creates meaning by simply being there. His movement through the space as well as his personal associations and visualisations turn him into a physical feature of the installations.