Anouk Griffioen - Navigating the Imaginary

Anouk Griffioen (Enschede, 1979) has created a distinctive oeuvre of monumental charcoal drawings, which she sometimes works on for months in a delicate hand. Her drawings are characterized by their dream-like aesthetics, in which the observer literally feels overrun by nature. Her black and white panoramas of mysterious animal and plant kingdoms evoke a sensation that balances between a beneficent experience of beauty and a sense of foreboding.

Navigating the Imaginary
In the exhibition, the installation ‘Navigating the Imaginary’ took centre stage: a twenty-two metres long charcoal drawing, which Griffioen worked on intensively over a period of two years. For the passers-by in the Witte de Withstraat, this immense work functioned as an enlarged diorama. From the street Griffioen’s rich world of ideas unfurled itself through one narrow window.

Aside from drawings, Griffioen presented the video sculpture ‘Flo’, in which a girl wanders through a drawn space. This romantic tableau is projected onto a cube by means of a special video mapping technology, whereby the viewerd absorbed into her perception of the world. The work ‘Foliage’ envelops the visitor in an immense, almost impenetrable foliage, which comes to life with the visitor’s every movement within the space, due to motion sensors.

The exhibition was curated by Mariette Dölle (director of Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, and former artistic director of TENT).