Games People Play

The project room’s residency programme, as was launched last year, is continuing in 2004 with its focus on the notion of space, including all its possible interpretations. Some of the invited artists conceive space as the formation of a three-dimensional environment, while others investigate the notion’s symbolic aspects through the creation of different artworks and events.

The Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk has opted for the latter solution when she based her presentation of videos – all dealing with games both in their actual and in a structural sense – on the understanding of human relations as social games. In her work, social roles function as frames which each of us ‘fill in’ while taking a particular role. We also mould these frames according to the particular interactions and relations we participate in, so the mutable aspect of the social roles is of high importance. Her piece In the Field offers the best example for this performative nature of social roles. The participants are given various roles and no matter how strictly they intend to follow the rules that go with that particular role, every now and then they make lapses which sometimes entail expulsion from the game. In a certain sense, these videos are documentaries of the laboratory experiments Jeanne van Heeswijk astutely constructs.

With the project she intends to realize during her residency in the Museum Jeanne van Heeswijk will examine particular female roles in society via a series of video interviews. This project is developed on the basis of her participation at the Service exhibition in the Mucsarnok/Kunsthalle in 2001.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist whose work addresses art production and discourse in broad ranging and various ways. In her view art can offer room to others and she wants to create possibilities that are based on the thought that art must cross all boundaries developed during its own existence in society.