VANESSA VAN OBBERGHEN

http://www.vanessavanobberghen.com

http://www.susannakulli.ch/event/190

Vanessa van Obberghen (b. Seoul ) lives and works in Antwerp.

“The title 'Off shore world' is derived from off shore companies—which are companies where the main

activities often do not happen where the company is officially registered. Off shore world is a world that

is situated on a fine line between reality and an imaginary world. It is inhabited by people whom you

cannot situate in a clear racial or social group. Off shore people are people who fit in nowhere and

everywhere—they are like chameleons.”

Like earlier works of the artist, Vanessa von Obberghen’s current project stimulates a discourse about

identity and belonging. She puts the focus on people who, in specific situations, defy clear assignment

to a group, directing our attention to otherness and the position of the outsider.

Using crayons, Vanessa van Obberghen adds artificial color to black-and-white photographs of exotic

flower blossoms and human models. She displays these pictures next to drawings of genealogical

trees and strands of DNA she realizes in a deliberately playful fashion rather than copying them strictly

from scientific sources.

Small LED screens framed like drawings present material that contrasts with these defamiliarized

representations: video recordings of traditional African dances. The footage was shot during the

Festival du Niger held in Segou, Mali, by Alassane Insa Babylas N’diaye, a Senegalese artist and

friend of Vanessa von Obberghen’s: “I wanted images made by an African recording traditional dances

because his gaze would maybe be different then mine, but it turned out almost similar.

Vanessa von Obberghen is particularly interested in differences of perspective, in the process of

appropriation and the ambivalence it entails between proximity and distance, a characteristic feature of

the experiences for example of tourists and immigrants. She uses the term métissage to describe the

productive interferences that result:

“The métissage can be biological or circumstantial, but it is not the result of a mixture where each

component loses its properties on the way. Each component can be fully integrated: one meets one to

create one—people are the results not of half and half but of one plus one."