MQ Artist-in-Residence Naomi van Niekerk: The free space inside

MQ Artist-in-Residence Naomi van Niekerk
The free space inside
16.08. – 27.09.2024
ASIFAKEIL | MQ Showrooms | Free entry
Presentation & Filmscreening: Fri 23.08.2024, 19.30h | MQ Raum D

In a small, dark room, a dog barks, a glass falls over and a bird lands on a barbed wire fence. Behind a curtain, observed only by the camera, layers of thoughts are created in black and white on an animation table. This is the animation filmmaker's private stage, a secluded space in which movement and time are freely manipulated.
The films shown were made with fine black sand, which was photographed on a light table with fingers, brushes and porcupine quills. On Friday 23 August at 7.30 pm, the current MQ artist-in-residence Naomi van Niekerk will present her exhibition and a selection of her films in person at MQ Raum D.

Naomi van Niekerk (born 1984 in South Africa) is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, theatre, installation and printmaking. She holds a BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a diploma in the art of puppetry from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in France.
The act of collaboration is at the centre of Van Niekerk's work. To date, she has worked in the field of object-based theatre, printmaking and performance, always in an interdisciplinary and exploratory manner. In this spirit, Van Niekerk works with dancers, musicians and theatre makers to develop interdisciplinary performances that combine animation, live drawing, movement and music.
Van Niekerk's practice focuses on the visual interpretation of poetic and narrative texts, and this is where her diverse working methods come together.
Van Niekerk's use of the printing press, for example, is similar to the way photographers do it - identifying, isolating and capturing/documenting impressions of a particular image or moment and reproducing them in physical form. Similarly, the reworking of images in the form of etchings and linocuts is an attempt to emphasise the inherent theatrical or cinematic qualities of a single image, to evoke its different textures and tactility.
Van Niekerk works in this way both visually and temporarily, creating a series of multi-layered narrative images. Her endeavour to translate textual narratives into a tangible form led her to animation with sand.
Van Niekerk's interest in slowing down and decomposing movement goes back to her training as a puppeteer. Practising immobility while responding to micro-pulses and the process of animating the inanimate other through touch continue to inform her work with stop-motion animation.
More recently, she has used a combination of sand and stop-motion animation to give material form to poetic images - the ferocity of a barking dog, the lonely procession of a young woman through the city, the burgeoning tension of a passing car. This lends the image a certain tactility that allows the artist's presence to be captured in the material, while at the same time ensuring that each image comes alive with a narrative quality of its own.
In addition to sand animation, van Niekerk also uses scratch animation, in which the layers of the 35mm film are scratched in by hand. This technique of stop-motion animation, which is used just as carefully and deliberately as her work with sand, enables a physical representation of time in the image. Working with the medium of film enables her to capture the visual narrative in all its physicality and transience.

Naomi van Niekerk in conversation with Stefan Stratil