Lecture 'Dearest Tinkebell'

As described on her website, Tinkebell provokes by exemplifying the blind spots of modern society. She confronts a public that revels in being indignant about everything that has nothing to do with them, but at the same time is very apologetic about their own actions. She questions why millions of male chicks are brutally killed every day, but she gets arrested for threatening to do the same in public. Why are people who openly discuss the lowering of the sexual age of consent treated as vile pedophiles, but are ‘barely 18’ websites intensely popular?

In 2004 she turned her own cat into a handbag, while she tries to show people their own hypocrisy about the use of animals for consumption and leather production. Outcry from the online world followed. Blogs and activist sites published stories about the atrocity she had committed. In the first few days that the story went online, more than 40,000 unique visitors visited her website and her mailbox was flooded with violent threats and death wishes. So she became an expert in the negative site of social media and tried to find out how to deal with it: she tried to find the people behind them. By publishing the book Dearest Tinkebell (2009), she no longer is just the receiver of all this faceless anger, but takes charge in responding to it.

From there on she created several projects about the blind spots of the modern society. The project Save the World deals with this clash of cultures. The need to help people, to pamper our own ego without communication with those that are in need.

Bio - Katinka Simonse (Goes, 1979), also known as Tinkebell, is a Dutch artist who engages with issues around our morals and the way society is developing. She graduated at the design department of the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam in 2005. Later this year she will publish Waarschuwing: de schrijver van dit boek is kunstenaar – Tinkebell (Warning: this book is written by an artist – Tinkebell), a publication based on her visit to Idomeni, a Greek city where many Syrian refugees are located.

Students react with an artwork to Tinkebell's lecture

A performance by Alex Webber, Heesub Han, Oscar Cousins and Erlend Evensen