IFP is delighted to invite you to the opening of a new site-specific installation and work-in-progress show at IFP's project space Black Sesame. Dutch visual artist Esther Kokmeijer will create an artificial environment, inviting visitors into a thermal atmosphere of vapour and gas. Alongside the installation she will put on display her research and investigations undertaken in China. Starting with the idea of a drop of water and its three states of being, the artist traces the various ways in which vapour plays an essential role in our everyday lives, and what means we forfeit to gain control over it.
The works of Esther Kokmeijer express a sincere interest in the issues with which human kind engages in a relentless battle: our desire to control the forces of nature to our benefit. During her research process at IFP she has explored various ways in which this interaction nurtures both poetic dances with the wind and hyper-precise cloudseeding maneuvres. You are invited to join this dialogue and wander through the vapour, data and ideas collected over the past six months.
Saturday July 12th, 5 – 9pm, Black Sesame, Heizhima hutong 13, Beijing
About the artist
The world at large and the connections and movements within it are the main focus of the work of Esther Kokmeijer. She is investigating the origins of nature through mappings of intersections between man-made and ‘natural' forms of reality. She is interested in the way ‘landscapes’ are shaped, interact and interfere in the lives of people and vice versa. In her travels across the globe she explores quantifiable positions related to geographic coordination systems, climatic phenomena and politically vs topologically defined borders.
The coming years, Kokmeijer is working on a trilogy about the human urge to control nature. A trilogy about the three different stages of water (vapour, liquid and solid) and the way we interact with it. She questions the potential to control the weather, reclaim and or protect land from the sea and to have ownership of ice.
Esther Kokmeijer is born in 1977 in Dokkum (The Netherlands) and is based in Rotterdam. For various projects she has visited 76 countries. Her work has been widely exhibited and published. In 2008 she published ‘A Summary of the World’, a book about her journey to the centre of gravity of each continent.
www.estherkokmeijer.nl