This must be wonderful!
I don’t understand it at all.

‘This must be wonderful! I don’t understand it at all.’ consists of three works for my first solo-exhibition at WOW-Amsterdam in 2017. The works are a visual exploration of ‘Terror Management Theory’, an anthropological theory that describes the ways in which humans cope with the fear of death on an emotional, intellectual and societal level.
I used the verticality of the show-room to create a continuous narrative from the bottom to the top. The panels represent different stages in dealing with the fear of death. Each image-strip represents a keyword in the story-line that develops throughout the whole installation. I combined the results of extensive, keyword-based Google Image search-quests with images of my private archive and arranged them intuitively. The images from a vast array of cultural sources appear without an internal hierarchy in significance or origin. Each combination can strengthen, disturb or destroy the message of each original picture and create new meanings and interpretations all at once. Ultimately the works reveal fundamental similarities between people and eras with fundamentally different world views and encourage a more light-hearted attitude towards terror management, acknowledging the bizarre forms in which they are shaping our lives and culture.
The titles of the works derrived from fortune-cookie wisdoms.