RINEKE DIJKSTRA

Night Watching (2019), a three-channel video installation, features 14 groups of people observing and speakingin front of Rembrandt’s iconic painting The Night Watch (1642). These conversations vary from visualdescriptions to conjectures on the circumstances in which the painting was created. A group of Dutchschoolgirls discuss whether Rembrandt gave the only woman in the painting the face of his wife Saskia;Japanese businessmen consider the painting’s potential for tourism; and a group of young artists discuss whatit must feel like to make such an incomparable masterpiece. The scenes in the video are sequenced to explorethe different ways a viewer might relate to a painting and its subject. The first groups speculate about whatthey are seeing: for instance, a dog painted in a vague manner, or an illuminated girl. They are followed bygroups who link similar observations to their own personal lives, making comparisons between past andcurrent society. The final groups examine the painting within an art historical context.1

Dijkstra was given unprecedented access to film Night Watching in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour,after closing time, over the course of six evenings. She filmed directly in front of Rembrandt’s The NightWatch, so that the participants would have a personal and close encounter with the painting. When exhibitedat the Rijksmuseum, Night Watching was installed in a room adjacent to The Night Watch, offering visitors anopportunity to revisit the painting. In a broader context, Dijkstra’s Night Watching offers us the occasion toengage in and reflect on the conversational and social nature of people in a discursive relationship to art andhistory, and to consider the importance of storytelling in the creation of meaning, culture and history. Thesesubjects were similarly explored in Dijkstra’s 2009 video installation I See a Woman Crying which featuresBritish schoolchildren looking at and discussing Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman (1937) at TateLiverpool.

While the Beach Portraits that Dijkstra exhibited earlier in her career often focused on young people asautonomous subjects, the works in this new exhibition focus on connection. The duos and groups in theseworks have been captured all over the world, from the beaches of Poland, the United States, and the Netherlands, to various locations in Israel, Ghana, the UK, and Ukraine. In these pictures Dijkstra raises thequestion of how the bond between people becomes visible - which can be through a subtle resemblance inappearance, a similarity in bodily attitude towards the camera, the casual holding of two hands, or eventhrough a strikingly large difference between the characters. All photos in this exhibition invite the viewer toconsider the ways in which human beings can forge identity and potency through their connection to eachother. Precisely because of her exceptional eye for detail and the gestures unique to each individual, and hergreat sense of human relationships and emotions, these portraits shine a special light on the power of RinekeDijkstra’s unique oeuvre.

Rineke Dijkstra was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Her first solo exhibition took placein 1984 at de Moor in Amsterdam. Dijkstra’s photographs have appeared in numerous internationalexhibitions, including the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennale, the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo, Turin’s BiennaleInternationale di Fotografia in 1999 and the 2003 International Center for Photography’s Triennial ofPhotography and Video in New York; Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014); ICA, Boston in 2019; Barbican ArtGallery, London (2020); The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2022).

Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris (2023);Timken Museum, San Diego (2022); Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (2022); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam(2019) de Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2018); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2018), Louisiana Museum ofArt, Denmark (2017); Hasselblad Center, Gothenberg (2017); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.(2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012);Tate Liverpool (2010), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Stedelijk Museum,Amsterdam (2005-6), and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2001). She is the recipient of a number ofawards, including the Spectrum Internationaler Preis für Fotografie der Stiftung Niedersachsen (2018), theHasselblad Foundation International Award (2017), Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize – now DeutscheBörse Photography Prize – (1998), Werner Mantz Award (1994).

1 Citing text by Hans den Hartog Jager on the work _Night Watching_