About my work

We use stories and images to understand the world. This is one of the very basic principles of an artwork that I’m interested in exploring: how it creates meaning. My interest lies in investigating the way these stories and images are produced and conditioned, but I also work with the potential of art to redefine, or confuse what something means. For instance, in 2010 I carried out the project ‘This land is a land and a land and a land’, in which I attempted to open up what Swedish landscapes mean by looking at them through the eyes of people, from different countries, who moved to Sweden.

My last work is a series of drawings titled ‘Suspension’ and depicts artworks and objects in various states of uncertainty or mystification. The depicted works are concealed, under construction, out of context or out of focus. They are arrested in a space without walls, floors or ceilings whereas their meaning is suspended as well. ‘Suspension’ takes themes from previous works into a new direction; rather than redefining or answering questions about what our surroundings mean, the drawings intend to confuse and obscure what we think they mean.

Besides my individual practice, I have been working since 2003 with the Finnish artist Oskar Lindström on the project ‘It’s better to build than to fade away’, in which we have carried out various public art projects. Since 2007 I run, in collaboration with the artists Katja Aglert and Janna Holmstedt, the ‘SQUID project’, an online archive of texts written by professionals from the cultural field and a framework we use for live arrangements such as public events.
www.martijnvanberkum.com