Lecture: Synopsis

There’s something of an anthropologist approach in the way artist Paulien Oltheten zooms in on seemingly insignificant details of everyday life. A pedestrian’s gait, the way a case is held, the posture of office workers standing on an escalator –she identifies patterns and routines, and captures them in photos, sketches and videos. In 2011, this yielded A Sort of Lecture, a box full of documentation from which the reader compiles his or her collage of life in public space. Now Oltheten has turned her material into a live performance in which she discusses the findings she made in the Parisian business district La Défense. We discover why she’s interested in particular events or passers by and how she works like a detective as she attempts to connect disparate information. We learn to see the way she sees. Now, observing her with new eyes, we place her every gesture under the microscope –watching the watcher.

Bio – Paulien Oltheten (Nijmegen,1982) studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and was a resident artist at ISCP in New York in 2013.In 2012 she was awarded the Dutch Doc Award, and she presented screenings/performances at Jeu de Paume (2017), IDFA Amsterdam( 2016), De Buren, Brussels (2016), Fondatione Ratti, Como (2015), KW,Berlin (2015), NCCA Moscow (2015) and exhibited in several places: Where do we go from here, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2017), MOTF, Marres, Maastricht (2016). In 2017 she worked at Cité des Arts in Paris.