“It’s a basic thing to squeeze something to get power over it and to use it. Just squeeze…”, explains Martha Hjorth Jessen, and thus sets the slightly eerie tone that can also be sensed in her installation. “The work is based on my oldest and most powerful nightmare and I have done this in a therapeutic attempt to ally myself with my own anxiety, and through play and system to place the ‘monster’ outside of myself, so I can achieve a kind of image-cure of the nightmare.”  The nightmare consists of a static image representing a fat hand squeezing and crushing a thin hand of long, slender bones. The bone theme and the hands are reflected in the artwork’s “handprint negatives”, pressed by hand in skin-colored Fimo clay. The result evokes images of fossilized bones or crumbling vertebrae from the spine of a strange species, systematically and sequentially ordered on a shelf. “The shelf is as a repository for storing anything you no longer need, and which can be put away,” explains Hjorth Jessen. The shelf’s archive of varied but repetitive forms, also reflects the hopelessness of the nightmare’s eternal recurrence, which is represented through the sequentiallity of the presentation. The wooden shelf is dark and the small, sculpted “hand imprints” are in bright colors of various skin or bone-colored variants. This triggers an interplay between positive and negative, dark and light, where the artist’s own hand functions as the positive, whereas its imprint in the clay acts as a negative. This negative does not appear in opposition or contrast to the hand as an acting, physical appearance,  but evokes a completely different and alien embodiment. This other embodiment appears as an undecipherable strangeness. As Morse signals in a sequence, in a completely foreign language and with a strange annotation. In its distortion of the close and familiar body, the alienated secretion from the artist’s own body now appears as monstrous and ambiguous. It is a quest into the imprint of the hand; which is where art comes from, and from where energy is transferred to things”.

This video is an investigation into capturing a random time span. Through the analysis of the choices made by the car owners – which color car have they chosen and which direction do they take at this certain time. The emerging pattern visually translates the information of color and movement.

A number of social sciences use visual tools to analyze tendencies in society. Statistics is an example of how reality can be broken up into chunks, which can be used in calculations. Through these calculations tendencies are simplified and revealed in visual models such as pie- and bar charts.

This work is made in collaboration with the Turkish media artist Saygin Soher (Enschede). The decision to collaborate emerged from the idea of joining our very different styles and disciplines in a project where we could use our mutual love for science and mathematics as a base. We both use geometry to construct worlds in which to escape and play by our own rules.

Through joined forces we made this installation consisting of two elements; one is a sculpture constructed from random geometric polygons onto which an animation is projected. The animation takes a starting point in the form, which has been carefully mapped and digitally reconstructed. Through the animation an illusion develops where the triangles of the surface recompose themselves to create a new spatial experience. The consequence of this illusion is a deceiving show where the eye has trouble choosing between the physical reality and the illusion.


2007 slogs portarna upp till 475 m2 utställningsyta, tolv ateljéer för nyligen utexaminerade konstnärer samt en gästateljé. Med 300 besökare till varje vernissage och åtta utställningar per år är De Service Garage en av Amsterdams viktigaste kulturella plattformar.

De Service Garage är mer än en plats – det är ett initiativ av konstnärer för konstnärer, för att sätta sina egna regler. För att genomföra projekt och samarbeten. För maximal konstnärlig frihet.

När de lämnar sina lokaler nu i september lever visionen och De Service Garage vidare i mobil form.

På Scenen för live- och crossoverkonst ställer tio av De Service Garages medlemmar ut sina verk;

Frank Ammerlaan, Benjamin Roth, Linda Nieuwstad, Charlott Markus, Martha Hjorth Jessen, Fraser Stewart, Zoro Feigl, Daniel Hofstede, Michiel Schuurman och Arik Visser.
Utställningen är sammanställd av Charlott Markus.