Biography

Discussion

“My work grows out of questions I ask about existence, my existence.”

Ania Bien, April 1977 (Press Release, Castelli Uptown Gallery, New York)

Ania Bien’s artistry transcends the traditional boundaries of the medium photography. Bien typically makes series, sequences, or installations, because she needs these in order to depict the processes she observes. She also works with multiple images because a single image seldom fails to satisfy her desire. Bien communicates with her audience by requesting the observer’s conscious participation. Her work is not always easily and quickly understood. The observer has to be willing to be open-minded and commiserate in order to decipher Bien’s projects and to comprehend the meaning of her work. At the same time, there exists room for personal interpretation. Because of this ‘task’ that Bien assigns the viewer and which serves as the completion of the artwork­—the artwork being a bridge in the communication with ‘the other’, as Levinas has expressed it—Bien has been criticised in a review by Tim Hilton in response to the exhibition Outer Space at the Camden Arts Centre in London (1992). ‘I call this [Hotel Poland] a successful work of art, within its own terms. The problem is that its successes are relatively easily won. So it is with many photographic installations. They often seem to withhold some creative effort, as though asking the spectator to do the artist’s work.’ Hilton was apparently unaware of the necessity for participation that requires an effort in the experience of art—in this case, an installation. The function of art, in Ania Bien’s viewpoint, is to allow the observer to become aware of the mystery that underlies everyday reality, i.e. that we are to be continually amazed by existence. In her view, art is not to be seen as a decoration or entertainment, but as a spiritual, intellectual stimulus, which enables humanity to move to another level of consciousness, to an area of spiritual freedom. It is here that a renewed contact can occur with original feelings and moral values, which the consumptive, technological world insidiously threatens to take away from him.

Bien’s education was highly diverse. In addition to art—with graphic design, drawing, painting, and photography as her chief areas of interest—she also studied interior design and cultural anthropology. From time to time, these specialisations each come to play a role in her work. The most intense moments Bien experienced during her study, as she relates herself, were her drawing classes with Victor Candell and Leo Manso in the artists’ community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and with David Lund at Columbia University in New York. Provincetown’s unorthodox atmosphere attracted large numbers of young people, including artists, actors, and dancers. It was an environment in which little value was placed on traditional American taboos, such as interracial relationships or homosexuality. For this reason, the city drew people from all walks of life. Candell was an instructor who taught his students to observe connections that are ever-present. Yet he especially stimulated them with philosophical reflections concerning the essence of being an artist, encouraging them to seek their own identity in this respect, but also as a person. With Bien, Candell taught her that art stems from life (and not, for instance, from art produced by others). In his view, each artist must always return to his own source. He is required to account for his own standing in life and to work from his own specific physical, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional baggage in order to develop a vision that is personal.

After moving to Amsterdam, Bien went in search of opportunities to further her artistic development and to establish contacts in the Dutch art world. She applied for a position with the post-academic study programme Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem (currently in Amsterdam) and was subsequently assigned a studio. Ateliers ’63 was set up to give young artists the chance to rent a studio in the organisation’s building and to gain experience through meeting with experienced artists, who visit the studios on a regular basis to evaluate their work. Bien initially found working at Ateliers ’63 to be beneficial and was supported by the photographer Edgar Fernhout. After Fernhout’s death in the fall of 1974, however, Bien felt that most of the teachers affiliated with the institute provided an insufficient amount of inspiration and personal involvement. In addition, facilities such as a darkroom were still lacking at this time. For Bien, this uninspiring environment was a major disappointment in comparison with what she had been accustomed to in New York, where she was once part of the school of Abstract Expressionism. There was also the problem of getting used to an unfamiliar, relatively closed society. These factors, combined with an often depressing climate, were what led to Bien’s inability to express herself as she had done back in New York. With her perspective of the world becoming more and more black-and-white, photography proved to be the medium best suited to the situation in which she found herself. During this period of transition, Bien focused on a lesson that she had been given by her previous teacher Candell: go in search of your own personal definition of point, line, and surface. In acting upon this advice, Bien began to devise photographic studies of form that she encountered in her own surroundings: dialogues between black and white, vertical and horizontal, stability and change. These form studies—’finger exercises’ as she calls them—were made with ordinary, everyday objects and patterns, such as a bunch of tulips, the corners of a room, or a typical Dutch dike. These items helped Bien to come to a better understanding of Dutch culture, to find a place for herself within it, and to develop her own visual idiom. Bien’s background—encompassing three different cultures and three different languages—allowed her to experience reality’s diversity, and from there, to seek out what the essence was for her—a quest in search of the mystical instant ‘(…) when [the] image before my eyes and the insight merge, a moment of personal truth (…)’.

Bien feels more like an artist than she does a photographer. Technique, in itself, plays no prominent role in her work. The photo as an object is not the most important end result, but rather the transmission of an idea. Yet Bien is extremely fascinated by the varied and powerful means that photography has to offer, e.g. the ability to capture a moment in time and to apply it in the context of another time and space: ‘(…) plasticity of time, not the medium (…)’.

Bien usually exhibits her photographic works within a given context, in order to suggest a specific meaning. In a number of works, she expresses herself in the form of a triptych. A combination of contrasting images allows one to design a stream of thought: the unravelling of a visual message, concealed in a few interconnected photos. At the same time, the triptych format forces the artist to limit herself to a compact delineation. This builds tension. In doing so, Bien wishes to realise an idea through a minimum of means. She has not desire to manipulate reality, but instead intends to use it for what she hopes to make manifest: the mystique of life. ‘Behind the coulisses of the image is where things are really going on’, is her premise. What ultimately forms the artwork are the abstract ideas that interact with the photos and give substance to the space in between. The spatial effect as well determines the extent to which the observer sympathises with the work of art: he must not be distracted by surroundings that are irrelevant.

For Bien, photography is an effective tool for exposing reality. It also functions well as a medium for the symbolism her visual idiom requires. She refuses to be limited by boundaries of a technical nature, but likewise has no desire to substitute reality through technique or partake in photographic experimentation typically accomplished by such means. Bien often chooses to mix techniques—combinations of photography with language, painting and drawing—and to integrate objects and photos in order to work spatially. One example of this mixed technique is Transit, which consists of a photo of two people walking down a road—shot from above—and two drawings, which suggestively echo the light of the road and the darkness of the grass. The three components of the artwork—all made of paper—are organised in a way that they appear to flow into each other. Transit poses the inevitable question of: where do we come from and where we are headed? In the artworks Remembrance I and Remembrance II, Bien combines photos with objects taken from reality, which also play a role. Remembrance I consists of two life-size photos of the artist herself, who investigates the forms and colours of stones with fascination; Remembrance II consists of two life-size photos, in which Bien smells freshly cut grass. The photos are mounted on the wall at a low level and extend across the floor. The gravel and the hay scattered in front of the image allow the photographic space and the actual physical space in which the work is exhibited to merge, as it were. Bien’s artworks stimulate the senses and are reminiscent of the smells and objects that one learns to distinguish in his youth. Recollections of smells and tangible objects are materialised by the concrete presence of hay and stones. A photo is not just a representation, but also material. As an object, the photo has a tactile form of its own, which is different than the materials found in painting and drawing. The combination of materials with their sometimes contrasting surface structures is a way to break free of the photographic image’s content in order to give an artwork new content.

Format plays an essential role in Bien’s photos. She observed in herself, as a woman, an unconscious tendency to present her work in a modest manner. She initially printed her photos in very small formats (6×9 cm). Upon realising why she was doing this, however, Bien felt the need to break out of this pattern. By this time, she understood that the only decisive factor in determining the format of her images was their content. To focus attention on her ideas, Bien’s installations are today presented in colossal formats, when deemed necessary.

Bien exhibits her work both in the Netherlands and abroad on a regular basis. She participates in group exhibitions and installations and already has numerous solo projects to her name. For a number of installations, Bien adapts the spatial surroundings herself. This often obliges the observer to observe and think consciously. In order to follow Ania Bien’s train of thought and to reveal her photographic vocabulary, a number of the projects and installations she has realised up until this time will now be described and analysed in chronological order.

In the performance Transient Matter from 1980, past and present are placed in confrontation with a material object—the paper photo—and the symbolic discarding of past moments, achieved through the wadded up photos that have landed in and around a wastepaper basket. The underlying concept of this artwork is the irony of creating a material object that functions as a symbol for the passing of time and the transience of materials.

Mathematics of the Absurd is a sequence from 1981, which consists of three photos of burial crosses. The first cross bears the German text ‘Ein unbekannter Deutscher Soldat’ (‘An Unknown German Soldier’); the second cross, ‘Zwei unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten’ (‘Two Unknown German Soldiers’); and the third: ‘Drei unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten’ (‘Three Unknown German Soldiers’). At a cemetery in Northern France, Bien saw symbols in these burial crosses, which enabled her to express her view of this sinister, meaningless aspect of human behaviour.

The sequence Checkpoint Charlie dates from 1981 and consists of three photos with the dimensions 50×60 cm. This sequence alludes to the absurdity of the boundary between East and West Berlin.

The photo in the middle shows the white dividing line on the asphalt of the road at the border crossing. The same line as well marks the boundary between East and West Berlin on the asphalt. The photo on the triptych’s right shows the asphalt of East Berlin; the photo on the left, the asphalt of West Berlin. The absurdity of this division can hardly be represented in a simpler and more grotesque manner.

In 1985, Ysbrand Hummelen selected Bien to participate in an exhibition project coordinated by Frank Gribbling in Amsterdam based on the theme of City Thoughts. She did this with her first spatial installation, entitled Insomnia, in a space at Oudezijds Voorburgwal 131. In a compilation of photos and objects from different sources and periods and in various formats (varying from contact print to 120 x 180 cm)—such as newspaper photos, echoscopic and electroscan images as well as related objects—she suggested how the spirit might work or the direction a stream of thought might follow. The sound of a loudly ticking clock was also part of the installation, included as a warning of the passing of time, both in the installation itself as well as in the moment of observing it.

In 1987, Bien made the installation Hotel Polen (‘Hotel Poland’), inspired by a menu stand found in the Amsterdam hotel of the same name, which was destroyed by fire in 1977. The stand itself bears the inscription ‘Hotel Polen’ and was purchased years before in a store specialised in Jugendstil and Art Deco. This object served as the point of departure for an installation comprising eighteen photos with the dimensions of 2 meters high by 1.20 meters wide. The menu stand is photographed from the same position in every photo, in front of a black background. The first and last photos in the series show just the stand. In the remaining photos, however, an object or photo rests on the stand: a family portrait, a photo of a German Shepherd, a happy little girl laughing, a luggage tag. By arranging the photos in a relatively closed space designed for this very purpose­—resembling a hotel hallway—the symbols of the menu stand with object, which at first appear to be random, begin to reveal a suggestive correspondence. The luggage tag, a letter to K. Bien, and a fragment of a land map of Poland showing the area around Auschwitz, together form a clear message. The artwork’s ‘narrative’ refers not only to the artist, but also the history of Poland during World War II.

Past Perfect from 1988 is an homage to Franz Kafka, with whom Bien feels a personal bond. This work is a sequel to the installation The Maze from 1987, in which Bien first expressed her shared fate with this Eastern European artist. Past Perfect consists of clusters of black-and-white photos taken by Bien and reproductions of archive images from Kafka’s life in different formats. The photos obtain meaning through their shared context. The images are printed either sharply or blurred, thereby forcing the observer to step closer or move back in order to get a clearer view. The installation integrates photos from Kafka’s life in Prague with photos taken in Manhattan, the city where Bien once lived. She contemplated how it would have been had Kafka not died of tuberculosis in 1924, but had instead fled from Hitler’s terror during the 1930s to New York. In that case, he is certain to have wandered about the city as an old man, with memories suddenly appearing in flashes more vivid than the physical surroundings in which he found himself at that particular moment. The photos confront the past and present, creating an atmosphere of fear and loneliness based on the displacement of an individual imprisoned in memories of the places and relationships he was forced to leave behind. In the installation, two lives from two different periods come together, as it were, in a relationship that never actually existed, but in which recognition plays a major role.

The exhibition Amnesty 1991 was made on the occasion of Amnesty International’s thirtieth anniversary and is based on the organisation’s publication No More Excuses. The thirty portraits of political prisoners found in this book—symbols of Amnesty International’s activities during this thirty-year period—were reproduced by Bien in photos adorned with iron frames, which were added to suggest prison windows. Over the mouth of each person portrayed, a word has been printed that represents a symbolic dialogue between the prisoner and the viewer. On one hand, the words refer to the portrayed individual’s lack of freedom; on the other hand, they refer to our need to feel connected to these people.

The photography project HOME was conceived in December 1992 at Edinburgh, Scotland, during a meeting of European leaders. It was exhibited for the first time at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam in September 1993. HOME is an ostensibly simple photographic triptych presented in an extremely large format (200 x 300 cm), which confronts the observer with the desolate locations in a city where homeless people spend their days and nights: the remnants of a cardboard box to sleep on, empty beer bottles, a newspaper, pieces of wastepaper, empty pizza boxes. Because the actual homeless person is absent from the image, we are afforded space to wonder who this person is, someone who lives so near us, exposed to such an indifferent world, but without our knowing him. The implications of the title ‘HOME’ are significant in a multitude of ways. It stands for memories of one’s childhood home, the basis of our existence, the values we received there, at the same time offering a sense of security, a safe home base, the status of our place in society, the walls behind which we retreat and which allow us to isolate ourselves from the angry outside world. This triptych, however, concerns the absence of a home, the symbolic reflection of the loss of values in our society, and ‘(…) the shortcomings of our social structures in taking responsibility for one other’, as Bien wrote in the 1993 publication that accompanied this project. ‘In the remnants left behind, I see a testimony of the spiritual decay around us, which only makes us more vulnerable to totalitarian powers dressed in new attire.’ During his opening speech on the occasion of Bien’s retrospective at the Jewish Historical Museum, Jacques Wallage—the then under-secretary of the Ministry of Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid (‘Social Affairs and Employment’)—observed: ‘Where the falling away of the Cold War should have had a liberating effect, only now are the real tensions apparently coming to light. Nations are swerving off course; with open borders, large differences in levels of prosperity ensure that people are coming to take what we are not coming to bring. What has been presented to us as a means of enrichment, open borders, and the free transport of goods, turns out to have a dangerous undercurrent: the more open our borders, the more closed our spirit. (…) She [Ania Bien] shifts the discussion of the question: “Is the Netherlands full?”, “Is the rich West full?” to the question: how empty is the existence of those who fail to provide shelter?’

Anna Bien does not feel she has been specifically influenced by any one movement or artist. In terms of content, however, her work has been compared to that of Christian Boltanski, who likewise makes use of the melancholy effect brought about by diary-like, personal relics and archival images in his art. Clearly, Bien’s work is closely associated with the underlying cultural and historical issues affecting the surroundings in which she grew up, both in Poland and New York.

The conceptual thinking that lies at the foundation of Bien’s forms of expression is generally influenced by developments in art occurring in the 1960s and early 1970s. Contrary to most of the Dutch conceptual artists from this period, Bien was never busy with seeking out new ways of observing, e.g. via perspective correction or photographic commentary on abstractions, as in the work of Jan Dibbets, or toying with abstractions and reality, as in the work of Ger van Elk—to cite the two best-known examples. Faithful to what she had learned from Victor Candell, Bien works consistently on an oeuvre arising from her own life experience, as opposed to arising from art. In actuality, it is chiefly through this teacher/artist that she feels inspired.

In the world of Dutch art and photography, Ania Bien’s oeuvre has an identity all its own. It distinguishes itself through the form in which it is presented, related to the conceptual movements in art that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. The individual objects (photos and other attributes) that make up Bien’s installations and projects—when observed objectively—are not particularly aesthetic in nature, but sometimes even unsightly in their mundaneness. Only in their shared context do they have a meaningful function. It is the subjective element in the choice of this context as well as the spatial effect that makes these installations and projects recognisable as products of Bien’s artistry. For the Amsterdam exhibition project City Thoughts, it was Bien who was selected by Ysbrand Hummelen: ‘Because she allows the quality of life and her art to coincide, without further pretensions.’ This is an excellent characterisation of Bien’s oeuvre and personality. Through the depth that she manages to achieve in her ideas and the way in which she chooses to give them form, one can call her oeuvre—with HOME being her pinnacle work up to this time—an important contribution to artistic production in the Netherlands.

Documentation