Anna de Vriend

(she/her)︎︎︎

Anna de Vriend (1996, the Hague) graduated from BEAR ArtEZ in 2020 with an honours certificate. Her artistic practice is built upon research about the extensive livestock farming in the Netherlands and the absurdity of feigning control and practical rationality in an industry fueled by blood and dissociation. Her conceptual persona ‘The Crazy Sheep Lady’uses this research as material in performances and installations.

At the moment, Anna is researching the tactics used to demonize close bonds between non-human animals and women during the witch burnings in Europe and the lasting effects of this. Her methodology involves fieldwork, performance, collecting materials, reading and examining her own relationship with the non-human animals in her life.

Her practice is based around an ongoing research on the hierarchy between human animals and non-human animals. With the help of her conceptual persona – The Sheep Lady – she does fieldwork in spaces where this hierarchy becomes tangible, like slaughterhouses and zoos. The material she collects ends up in various artworks ranging from performative installations to sculpture to photography. Where she combines a theatrical and absurd approach with cold-hard reality to draw the viewer into her world of questioning this hierarchy and taking responsibility for embodying a power position over non-human animals.

Anne Schoemaker

(she/her)︎︎︎

Anne Schoemaker (1997, Deventer) graduated BEAR ArtEZ in 2020. She operates from the conviction that artistic processes can establish a deep and meaningful connection between people, material, time and spaces. Non-human objects and places have their own narratives and autonomy that both influence and get influenced. These connections form the base for films, objects and photographs that carry the viewer into a dreamy state.

Through her embodied experience, Anne currently is exploring the relation between concepts such as silence, muteness, and the architecture/objects we are surrounded by. As a person with a neuro-atypical brain, she experiences a whole other universe that is concealed by the normative verbal environment; a concealment that makes the violence and aggression towards minority groups hard to grasp.

Kai

(they/them/she/her)︎︎︎

Kai (1995, Ghent) graduated from BEAR ArtEZ in 2020. They are non-binary and queer which influences their work as an artist. Visibility, the body and non-conformity are main themes in Kai’s projects. Through delicate handwork, writing, painting, drawing and mixed pressing techniques they create booklets, performances, costumes and letters that confront the onlooker with the reality of not being able and not wanting to fit in an existing framework.

Harriet Caldwell

(she/her)︎︎︎

Harriet (1995, High Wycome, UK) graduated BEAR ArtEZ in 2019. Her work balances itself between separation and presentation. It is a visualization of the presence of absence, and monotony of daily movements, showing their unseen beauty in fixed captured works. Enlisting the help of unknown performers to subconsciously create the work. This conversation between both the piece and the participant in an act of giving.

Harriet regulates the environment where the work is manufactured when it is placed in the space of the audience; and then relinquishes this control. She sees how the public reacts to it, this chaos, this lack of order. It is the complete opposite of her work, yet it plays an important role. This ordered, neatness, the framing of space. There is a balance between obsessively making these works, and the unanticipated reactions it generates.