Finn Stevenhagen - In my tender care
Pulchri Studio is honoured to invite recently graduated artists from various academies around the country to join our association. We also offer them the opportunity to exhibit their work free of charge in a first solo exhibition within our gallery. This initiative is made possible thanks to the support of the Pulchro Sacrum Foundation. This exhibition features Finn Stevenhagen (NL/GB). He graduated from the ArtScience course at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2023.
‘In my tender care’ is an Expanded Cinema Installation describing the estrangement between Charlie and his mother. The installation, which stems from a screenplay, attempts to restore choice to the audience by removing the chronology of a film's timeline.
The installation consists of animatronic talking mouths in a set, a room-high projection of computer-generated animations and a video work presented on a CRT television screen. ‘In my tender care’ presents turning points and whole acts simultaneously, locked in scenes scattered around the room. Exploring each scene reveals more of the story and the scenes can be viewed in any order.
Characters, who take the form of incorporeal floating mouths and digital humans, inherit empathy through their animator's fidelity. As artificial forms, these characters are forced to explore the limits of the emotions their bodies can express. By comparing a character's limited capacity for expression with their desire to do exactly that, they clearly present artificial representations of people as close as possible to their real-life counterparts.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by Stroom Den Haag.