LandEscape Art Review | Page 152

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
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