+33 1 44 78 75 00
Open: Wed-Fri 11am-8pm, Sat-Sun 10am-8pm

5-7 Rue de Fourcy, 75004, Paris, France
Open: Wed-Fri 11am-8pm, Sat-Sun 10am-8pm

Visit    

Artist: Rineke Dijkstra

The MEP presents a major exhibition of the video works of the internationally renowned Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. Taking over one complete floor, Dijkstra will install four of her most important video installations, all presented for the first time in a Parisian institution.

Dijkstra is celebrated both for her photographic and video work, many of which deal with questions of identity, the passage of time and intimacy. Already present in the collection of the MEP, among many major global collections with substantial photographic series often following the development of her portrait subjects over extended periods of time, Dijkstra’s work in portraiture has turned increasingly to video in recent years.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Rineke Dijkstra has established her reputation with an incredible sensitivity to the ethical and creative contract put in place when an artist sets out to capture the appearance and personality of a human subject with the camera lens, whether as still or moving images. Her work poses essential questions about the ways in which people present themselves to be seen, and the ways in which this auto-representation changes over time, through age and experience, and through learned codes of socialisation.

The video works selected for the MEP exhibition deal exclusively with the ways in which younger people look, and present themselves to be seen as portrait subjects in the process of establishing their identities, whether as school students, performers and/or consumers of visual culture. In many ways, through holding up the camera to face her subjects, Dijkstra challenges us all to re-think the ways in which we look and attach meaning to images of others and thereby how we understand our own roles in contemporary society.

Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands, in 1959. Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the portrait genre by drawing on the history of portraiture – both painted and photographic – Rineke Dijkstra creates representations of her often adolescent subjects that appear simultaneously vulnerable and enigmatic. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed.

Her work has been exhibited around the world, including a comprehensive retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2012. She has been honored with the Johannes Vermeer Award (2020); Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017); the Macallan Royal Photographic Society Award, London (2012); the Citibank Photography Prize (1999) and the Kodak Award Netherlands (1987), among others.