RABIN HUISSEN
Name: Rabin Huissen
Birthplace: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Home: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Disciplines: Photography, drawing, painting and installation
Body, Untitled, 20.05.18, 09:31#09:38 a.m., 25°NE, 43.1°C, B14/F4/2, RMUTT, Thanyaburi, Thailand,
Washed in shower water, photo by Christina Nesterova
What is the process behind your works?
They result from meticulous rituals, where I follow a script with instructions I set for myself and others, in order to trace movements in time. The scripts work as a frame on a structural level, where I am the initiator and often the "performer", but I also invite others to take part. These are the ingredients of my work: the script, which sets up a situation, human contact, and the natural conditions which allow for the experience to happen. A diverse spectrum of results appears, from small to human-scale photograms, letters, and postcards I exchange with others, series of photos and sculptural objects.
How do you define your practice in three words?
The present moment, Memories and History.
What makes the poetry of your work?
My works are evidence of an intimate body experience, based on travelling out of daily life, undressed from social roles or masks. At the time this event was occurring, something else was happening to someone else and the work moderates and connects this simultaneity. By preserving the energy of the moment in that object, my history links to other people’s history. In this sense, my body is used as a tool for correspondence on a meta-level, which embodies the wish for completeness and the aspiration for wholeness. I inscribe it on paper, previously prepared with photo emulsion which reacts to light. Time is the invisible agent, and that is probably what makes the poetry of the whole process.
How does your work reflect our current times?
I think my artworks speak visually about my state. They preserve the energy of the moment and reflect our current times. Each body absorbs experiences of life. In the end, these artworks mirror who we are.
What do you want to achieve?
I am searching for a universal visual language, a language that everybody could relate to. While my works come from a conceptual basis and a very precise process, they are also very physical and organic. They map inner feelings and reveal physical reactions through an echo of abstraction. It is all based on the idea that facts per se are not interesting. In my opinion, those facts gain meaning when mediated by humans with the interference of external conditions, which bring them from potency into being.