The Risky Business exhibition brings together four female artists who use fake identities in their work: they play a role-playing game with an alter ego in the lead role. Through this 'game', which constantly balances between fiction and reality, these artists create a sanctuary in which any identity can be assumed or lost, and they unsettle traditional role patterns.
Kimberly Clark (a collective of Josepha de Jong, Ellemieke Schoenmaker, Iris van Dongen) evokes the atmosphere of a world full of parties and nocturnal misbehavior. Scenes from her life are depicted in sculptures, installations and photo series in which a female figure – a self-portrait? – is central. Kimberly Clark stages the exhibition space into a three-dimensional account of her struggle in and with a complex world. Their 'Crusade, Rotterdam' was a mountain of construction waste that is climbed by two women. The image is challenging, theatrical and energetic, but has a somber undertone: the mountain seems indomitable and the women are frozen in an eternal climb. Moving between cheerfulness and venom, the works speak out about issues such as identity and (constructed) image.
Fashion designer Monique van Heist designs for fictional characters such as Tina, Kim, Simon, Clive, Rony and Toni. These are people who do not always conform to the standard ideas of what should be male or female, successful or unsuccessful. For example, the homeless Clive is not someone you immediately associate with haute couture fashion. And yet Clive has a beautiful wardrobe that enables him to cope with the outside world, a dress code that gets him through it.
Cora Roorda from Eijsinga searches in spatial installations and photo series for the boundary between authentic identity and pasted-on label. In many of her works, female roles are central; the woman as seductress, as daughter, as subordinate to the man. The photo series Something Shifted Ever So Slightly, made in collaboration with photographer Judith van IJken, portrays the 'daily life' of an unknown woman. The images search for the boundary between played role and real identity.
Lydia Schouten, the grande dame of video and performance art, shows her groundbreaking work from the eighties. Her alter ego wanders around in almost clumsily designed sets. She was one of the first to use the video camera to question role patterns and traditions in her films. In a period in which image formation began to be strongly influenced by the mass media, she created her own counter-image. Schouten is a true storyteller, in a visual language that seems to have sprung from fantasy, but always has a socially oriented undertone. Sometimes parodying, then seriously, Lydia Schouten makes it clear that stereotypes are there to be broken.