Book Information

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien Van Oldenborgh’s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters on film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions.

The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and who each offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre. These authors include: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, and Grant Watson.

Amateur is published in conjunction with the Heineken Prize for Art, which Van Oldenborgh received in 2014 and is supported by the Mondriaan Fund. Amateur is edited by Emily Pethick and Wendelien van Oldenborgh with the assistance of David Morris, designed by Julia Born, and co-published by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; The Showroom, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin.