Artist in Residence 2024:
Naomi van Niekerk
In a small dark space a dog barks, a glass falls over and a bird lands on a barbed-wire fence.
Behind a THE FREE SPACE INSIDE curtain with only the camera as witness, layers of thought emerge in black and white on an animation table. This is the animator’s own private stage, a secluded space where movement and time is freely manipulated.
The films shown were made with fine black sand photographed on a light table using fingers, brushes and porcupine needles.
Naomi van Niekerk will personally present her exhibition and a choice of her films at Raum D / MQ.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Naomi van Niekerk (b. South Africa, 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in film, theatre, installation, and print-making. 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 Natio- nale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in France.
Central to Van Niekerk’s ways of working is the act of collaboration. To date, she has worked in the realms of object-based theatre, printmaking, and performance, always in an interdisciplinary and exploratory manner. In this vein, Van Niekerk works with dancers, musi- cians and theatre-makers to develop interdisciplinary performances merging animation, live drawing, movement and music.
At the heart of Van Niekerk’s practice is the visual interpretation of poetic and narrative texts, and it is here that her myriad ways of working converge.
Van Niekerk’s engagement with the printing press, for example, is similar to that of a photographer’s way of seeing – identifying, iso- lating, and capturing/documenting impressions of a specific image or moment, and replicating it in physical form. Similarly, reworking images as etchings and linocuts is an attempt at highlighting and evoking the inherent theatrical or filmic qualities of a single image – its varying texture and tactility.
In this way, Van Niekerk works both visually and temporally through a series of rich, narrative vignettes. Her desire to give material form to textual narratives drew her to sand animation and, since 2015, she has directed, animated and independently produced several short films.
Van Niekerk’s interest in slowing down and decomposing movement dates back to her training as a puppeteer. Here, practicing stillness while responding to micro-impulses, and the process of animating the inanimate other through touch is what continues to inform her way of working with stop-motion animation.
More recently, the combination of sand and stop-motion animation is what she uses to lend material form to poetic imagery – the feroc- ity of the barking dog, the lonely procession of a young woman moving through the city, the bristling tension of a passing car. This lends the image a certain tactility that allows for the presence of the artist to be held in the material, while also ensuring each frame is alive with an independent narrative quality.
In addition to sand animation, van Niekerk makes use of scratch animation, which entails a physical scratching into the layers of 35mm film. This technique of stop-motion animation, just as slight and deliberate as her process of working with sand, allows for a physical representation of time in the image. Working with film allows her to make sense of the visual narrative in all of its physicality and ephemerality.