Artist Statement
Within her work Janina Kempkens contemplates the everyday and its existential potential lying within such banality in combination with more romantic, mysthical notions.
In a mixture between realist, romantic and the absurd there is an aspect of looking at specific things and situations in an abstract way.
Exploring surreal situations within this context there are also ways of breaking expectations, of reversing inside and outside.
Cinematic photographs and photographic film scenes let us get a grasp of a world built that might seem to expand beyond our view which we can only understand in a non-theoretical but an affective way.
With an affinity for theatrical moments there is an aspect of camp in some of the artists work, laying next to its humour and existential dread.
A wild ride of a holiday with young befriended artists, romantic still lifes and cityscapes, countless (self-)portraits, scans of different day to day materials trapped into gypsum all give us an insight into what it means to be human in an almost anthropological way, what queer narratives can play out as and how bizarre human interaction and intervention could be seen as.
Most of the artists work can best be grasped as in a way one looks at a poem, a conglumerate of beauty and distress that beholds itself from being completely understandable in a logical sense but rather let‘s ones mind wander.