© 2010
Oponthoud / Delay
by Wilma Sütö*
Scintillating interaction with the world around us, everyday reality for the mobile EU-citizen, develops in the work by Roderick Hietbrink (Netherlands, 1975) entitled Parallax (2002) into a disorientating experience. Hietbrink subjects an architectural space to audio-visual influences which seem to transform themselves. The all-pervading, continuously changing images and sounds produce vibrations in the physical surroundings. The traveller has arrived in a network city, which leads a life of its own. The town plan is impossible to assimilate at a glance. Around the corner is another corner, and whatever the visitor's viewpoint; the city fragments anyhow. On three different walls, video projections of buildings light up. They are graphic patterns, several metres high, of facades, monumental details affording views of contemporary structures in concrete, steel and glass: examples of architecture built in the past decade in Rotterdam's Kop van Zuid district (a recently developed area in the south of Rotterdam) While one's eye attempts to focus on window or door frames, light reflections in the plate glass, girders or other striking elements, new images keep sliding over the previous ones. Your grip is further undermined by the accompanying sounds: indefinable shifting of persons or goods, first in one corner, then in another. The incessant metamorphosis in the surroundings activates the visitor, in two senses. As he explores, mesmerized, the changeable space, his desire grows to escape from this ' crystal palace' for the 21st century.
Wilma Sütö ©2004
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* Wilma Sütö is a writer and critic and is curator of modern and contemporary art at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
Excerpt of the publication as part of the exhibition Oponthoud / Delay at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in 2004
http://www.naipublishers.nl/kunst/oponthoud_nl.html
For more information on the video installation Parallax click here, http://www.roderickhietbrink.nl/work/parallax
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