Kari Robertson is a visual artist and curator originally from the U.K now living and working in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She graduated with an M.A in Fine Art from The Piet Zwart Institute in 2016.
For the past several years Kari has been working in time-based media, primarily sound, analogue film, and digital video. She often makes installations where a single moving image is divided across multiple screens—or transcends multiple temporalities—connected by a shared audio track. By creating constellations of works; groupings with space between pieces, she allows for contingent and unpredictable relationships between material and meaning to occur. Recent works explore contemporary subjectivity through narrative. Kari’s works often begin with a theoretical proposition and then try to animate and personalize this material through forcefully situating it in specific characters, she understands this as creating scenarios through speculative embodiments. Humour and absurdity are prevalent within these works.
At Deltaworkers Kari will develop a new body of moving image works, starting from an interest in how ‘architecture’ can be considered in expansive contexts that transcend human design, or manufactured materials. In the Louisiana swamps the term ‘aquatic architecture’ becomes a focus, which is produced somehow by, or for, water. Aquatic architectures may be soft or permeable rather than rigid or fixed, temporary rather than permanent, entangled and polluted. It will likely be difficult to define where exactly they begin or end.
Using her methodology of employing characters, narrative, humour, and absurdity to analyse complex material, Kari will explore hydro-entanglements between water, humans, and other creatures and the interwoven ecological, mythological, and biological stories around them.