LandE scape
Christin Bolewski
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Academy of Media Arts in Cologne was also a good place to reflect not only the aesthetic possibilities of digital media, but also the social, political and global impact that these new technolgies would have on all of us. My post-graduate diploma in 1996 was a worldwide network and internet project called WorldVideo 40 North that was testing Marshall McLuhan’ s idea of the‘ Global Village’ by creating a network of places and people around the globe who were simultaneously recording their places and environments. We also had a lot of international staff and students at the Academy, so working with people from different nationalities became quite normal for me, also engaging with their cultural differences. I then started travelling a lot, a lot of my artwork deals with the topic of travelling and documenting foreign places, cultures and different environments. I particularly love travelling to Asia as it is a culture that is not so easily understood straight away by Western people. Hence I started to read a lot about Eastern Art and philosophy and also studied Eastern principles of aesthetics and visual composition. The‘ foreign’ or the‘ other’ became a strong reference in my practice – basically to understand my own culture by reflecting it against a different cultural and aesthetic set-up.
Over these years you have experimented with a wide variety of different techniques. The figurative language you convey in your pieces is the result of a constant evolution of your searching for new means to express the ideas you explore in your works: your inquiry into the expressive potential of colors combines together figurative as subtle abstract feature into a coherent balance. We we would suggest to our readers to visit http:// www. christinbolewski. de in order to get a synoptic view of your work: in the meanwhile, would you like to tell to our readers something about the evolution of your style? In particular, would you shed light on your usual process and set up?
Usually I go travelling with a small video camera and record everything which is of interest to me. So in the first instance I create observational documentary video
22