Sara ten Westenend

"No need to make swans or boats" from the black and white series 2010

Born: 1978, Netherlands

After graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2006), Sara ten Westenend moved to Brussels where she developed her artistic practice. The basic artistic assumption that characterizes her work is redefinition. This assumption becomes visible in her three-dimensional work, by doing interventions and writing texts. For her research she uses everyday objects from her direct environment in which image and language are closely connected. She does this by securing objects to their environment with masking tape, by showing or deleting borders of a space and by rearranging words or repeating actions. Like this she wants to increase our sense of time and space.

At the moment her main questions are:
Where lies the thin border between the imaginary and the real, between thinking and seeing?
Where does the image come into existence?
Is the image something static, or is it constantly revealing itself through the acts of seeing and thinking?

The most important thing for her is to find a new space in everyday environment as a way to survive and to make "a room of one's own". By making this process public, she lets people be part of this room. In this way she makes them aware of their presence and invites them to become sensitive of their surroundings.
The main object of her research is how to present an image in the reality of a space and how to present the reality of space as an image.