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Bernice Nauta | Playlist on Spirit
Bernice Nauta, 6 Untitled, 2023
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Dates:
03.11
2023
This playlist is part of SEA Foundation’s long-term programme on art and sustainability. The work is part of a series of commissioned works and as such linked to the Epilogue in fold #08 on Spirit.
Listen to other playlists by invitees like Venus Patel (US/IE), Costin Chioreanu (RO), Susana Lopez a.k.a. Susan Drone (ES), Caz Egelie a.k.a menu menu (NL), Irene de Boer (NL), Pei-Hsuan Wang (TW/BE), Ophelie Naessens (FR), and Gala Porras-Kim (CO/US).
Press
Commission
Bernice Nauta
Playlist on Spirit
“I am sitting in the waiting room of my GP. I am too early for my appointment, take my computer and decide this is the moment I will write a few words for SEA FOUNDATION about spirits. It begins with staring at the screen for some time and thinking; what actually is a spirit? Suddenly, a sound catches my attention. It’s the bubbles from the aquarium next to me that sits on a table in the waiting room. As I turn my head to the right, two identical fish appear in my view. They are in the lower left corner exactly next to each other and stare at me in an identical way. I look back, they don’t move, I freeze, the sound of the bubbles intensifies. ‘Hick’. The fishes’ fins begin to move. They start swimming but don’t move as they swim into the glass. ’Hick’. I got the hiccups. ‘Hick’. The fish suddenly freeze. I hold my breath, my hands feel moist. ‘Hick’; it doesn’t stop ‘Hick’. Bubbles are coming out of the beaks of the fish, they don’t move. I feel something in my throat, ‘hick’; it’s a cold and heavy breath and the beginning of a sound. The fish keep looking at me. I can see in their face that they know what’s inside of me. I know it too. But all I can tell you now is ‘hick’. ”
Spirits
Bio
Bernice Nauta is a Netherlands-based artist whose practice encompasses drawing and painting, site-specific installations, objects, stories, and films. Throughout the works parafictional characters appear which hover between paper, canvas, and the human body: they are object and subject alike and live in between the visible and invisible, like the figure of the stunt double. In this liminal space, Nauta’s protagonists are on a quest for identity and continuously in search of a form. Bernice Nauta received a BA in Fine Arts from KABK in The Hague and completed her MA at Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She exhibited extensively in the Netherlands and Belgium in solo and duo shows. She was an artist in residence at Hotel Maria Kapel (2023), NIKI Hannover (2021), and the European Ceramic Work Centre (2018).
