Sylvie Zijlmans
“The Uninvited”
April 30-July 9, 2006
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museumpark 18 20
3015 CX Rotterdam
tel.: 31 (0)10 4419400
Fax.: 31 (0)10 4360500
info@boijmans.rotterdam.nl
www.boijmans.nl
With The Uninvited, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen shows recent work by artist Sylvie Zijlmans. She frequently uses photographic means. Still, her works can be better described as sculptural installations.
Controlling doom is something of all time. It is a remedy against primal fears and a rich source of superstition and myth. With the exhibition The Uninvited Sylvie Zijlmans refers to this forgotten, magical undertow in our culture. She shows us unexpected images that acquire a fairy-tale meaning by the way they render menace and destruction visible. By lending an intimacy to the uncontrollable, it gains in intensity. Sylvie Zijlmans joins photographic and sculptural images together and integrates functional electrical parts in the work. In the monumental installation Dawn (2006), which stretches across several walls, she makes a drawing with hundreds of meters of supple black electrical cable, showing a few women dressed in chadors. Not much of the women can be seen, they are almost completely covered by the concealing dress. They do make the drawing visible: the uncovered parts of the body are rendered in white neon that lights up the room. The cable that forms the drawing, provides the current for the neon lighting. To be enlightened means to be visible. For Zijlmans, being enlightened is mainly a state of mind. The title Dawn emphasizes this in a subtle and poetic way. It is the moment at which the first rays of the sun chase away the nocturnal darkness.
Stockholm Syndrome
In The Stockholm Syndrome (2000) a white polystyrene man is holding a semi-transparent photograph behind his back, at the same time carrying the lights and cables that are needed to make the image in the photo visible. The work derives its title from the phenomenon that hostages, in their terror, start to identify with their abductors as soon as the latter show signs of humanity. The stiff polystyrene man is carrying a picture of a confused, running man who, in his turn, is carrying cleaning products.
Tropical Storms
Sylvie Zijlmans brings us face to face with something awesome that is much bigger than ourselves. In the series of works with names of recent tropical storms like Katrina, Stan, Wilma and Dennis from 2005 and 2006, Zijlmans shows the perpetrator and the victim united in one image. Tropical storms are given a name in order to make information about their development possible. Zijlmans uses these names as titles for her latest works. On sheets, hanging loosely along the walls, she shows larger than life depictions of adults and children, emerging from the darkness, dripping with water. These photographs are breathtakingly sharp, and it becomes clear immediately that something is wrong. They look like giants from an uncontrollable, dangerous world.
Sylvie Zijlmans
The work of Sylvie Zijlmans (Amsterdam, 1964) can regularly be seen at the Tanya Rumpf gallery in Haarlem. During the past years she has had exhibitions at, among other places, the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Provinciaal Museum Hasselt, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem.
This exhibition was partly made possible by a contribution from the H&F Patronage.
