Minne Kersten (1993, NL) is an artist based in Paris and Amsterdam, working with video, installation and paintings. Underneath these media lies a literary approach in which she combines several techniques to construct a world where objects and scenes hold traces of both facts and fiction. She speculates on how we can recall events, memories and stories, by tracing what is lost in what remains. Her work considers the relationship between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the ephemeral, and poses questions about memory and reconstruction. By drawing attention to the act of construction in both our shared real and imagined world, her work offers a connection between intimate themes such as mourning, loss and desire, and the collective domain of fiction, fables and symbol making.
Painting and drawings are continuously made during a process of introspection and research. They serve as a form of visual note taking, made alongside her spatial approaches. In recent years, she has used the method of crafting an architectural environment, which reveals itself as a scenography, a film set, and subsequent sculpture. Often informed by personal encounters with spaces, these sculptures provide a tangible terrain to explore how a space can witness or distort stories and events. By staging situations that embed symbolic elements such as the appearance of animals or phantom presences, she refers to ways of how the past can leave impressions on the present. Subjecting her scenes to chaos, decay and disruption, she suggests different outcomes of the familiar circumstance of feeling unstable, losing control and reaching a state of transition.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at CAPC Musée Bordeaux 2024, Glasgow International 2024, Bonnefanten Museum 2023, 16th Lyon Biennale 2022, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam 2022, the Living Art Museum 2022, Hotel Maria Kapel 2021, HISK Brussel 2021, Haus Wien 2021, De Ateliers 2020, among others. In 2022 she was awarded the Volkskrant Visual Arts Audience Award and was nominated for the Royal Award of Modern Painting. She participated in residencies at De Ateliers, Triangle-Astérides and Cité Internationale des Arts and is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.