AQUATIC REVERIE

Aquatic Reverie
2023
Series of underwater photographs

Aquatic Reverie continue Anouk Kruithof’s fluid practice between photography, sculpture and performance, as for example can be seen in her artist’s book Trans Human Nature (self-published, 2021) or her ‘retro-perspective’ Be Like Water (Mousse, 2023). These four images show ocean dreamscapes, in which we find suggestions of extremely ancient, translucent submarine lifeforms. Kruithof operates playfully at the precarious intersections of nonhuman natures and human materialities, the latter of which are more often than not disrupting forces. While vast spaces of the oceans remain unknown to us, we’ve been polluting the waters with (often transparent) plastics, which merge like cyborgs with the ocean’s natural inhabitants.

Aquatic Reverie alludes to the intensifying entanglement of human traces and the nonhuman, and confuses us as it becomes more and more difficult to keep the natural apart from the artificial. In an essay in Trans Human Nature it is expressed as follows: “The vegetal and natural materials intertwine with the faces of transhumanism, distorting them, covering them, multiplying folds and reflections to project onto it mutant, blurred and fertile identities.”

     –Taco Hidde Bakker

“My creative process usually starts with observations, followed by research and collecting material, which can vary from text to photographic images, from sound to videos, from found objects to natural and/or plastic waste. When I am busy with my collections, I feel like being in a large school of fish, moving together in the currents of the sea. Feeling small and strong at the same time. Sitting on top of my thousands of colorful books, slowly floating in my ocean of photographic images, or calling and texting with all the amazing assistants that were, as myself, madly searching dance videos from all around the world, I feel ‘connected’, I feel like I am more than just one being.”

Part of the this series was shown at Unseen Amsterdam, 2023 with gallery Vriend Van Bavink