Katrina Niebergal: come, Memory

18th May – 3rd June 2023

WET is open on Fridays and Saturdays
2pm-6pm
and by appointment

Opening: Thursday 18th May 6pm

WET is unfortunately not wheelchair accessible. There is an elevator to the 2nd floor and a flight of steps to the third floor. Please get in touch if you have any questions about accessibility.

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come, Memory is a result of a long-dreamed-of, research-led project, begun in September 2021, that centers around three research/recording trips taken to a series of ancient (especially Neolithic) European sacred sites.

The project included the recording of Super 8mm film, 35mm photo, and sound; preliminary, lived, and ensuing research, writing and reflection; the assembly of three short, experimental films, and a scenographic installation that vitalizes elements from the settings of the films, promoting a sense of the exhibition as a total reality.

The first film, shot on Malta and Gozo, is called Ogygia: testimony to a disappeared civilization. It’s a short, experimental documentary/speculative fiction that gives an account, in a somewhat ethnographic manner, of a remote land and its mysterious/mythological origins.

The second film, shot in Greece (Delphi, Delos, Naxos, and Crete), is called No talking spring. It’s also an experimental documentary/speculative fiction, set in 393 A.D., in which there is heard the last oracle of the last Oracle of Delphi.

The third film, shot in the county of Wiltshire, UK, is called the great mound (mama) — and is more a portrait of a body/place.

Beyond these things, the project also includes themes of: pilgrimages; the search for and abandonment/absence of identity; (re)tracing human relationships to technology/technological development; feminist (post-patriarchal/post-capitalist) futures; real and imagined places…

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Katrina Niebergal (b. on the unceded Traditional Territory of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rotterdam, NL. Through the combined means of moving-image, scenographic installation, sculpture, writing and sound, she tells stories and constructs environments concerned with the conditions of poetic consciousness and the dubious subject of the “feminine irrational”. Her current work and research are engaged with the speculative historicization of an absent feminine character.

Katrina received her MA from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (2019) and her BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2013). She was the founder/facilitator of The Pole, Rotterdam — an artist-run, un-definite exhibition space in operation from 2018 to 2022.

Katrina’s website

This Exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and CBK, Rotterdam.

Image: Still from come, Memory, Katrina Niebergal 2023 (Courtesy of the artist)