Rineke Dijkstra, The Weeping Woman, Tate Liverpool, 2009
One of the two films in Rineke Dijkstra’s exhibition I See A Woman Crying shows a group of children from a primary school who interpret Picasso’s painting Weeping Woman from 1937. Together, the children devise stories about the woman in the image – how she feels, where she has been and where she is going. We never get to see the painting, but the children’s imagination triggers our own. In the second film, we see how the schoolgirl Ruth, who is deeply concentrated and at the same time slightly distracted, tries to capture Picasso’s motif in her sketchbook.
Rineke Dijkstra got the idea for the two films in 2008 when she was artist-in-residence at Tate Liverpool, whose collection includes Picasso’s painting, and was fascinated by the museum’s educational work with local schools. She was particularly interested in the “work in focus” sessions, where children looked at works for a prolonged time and then were encouraged to discuss them. Dijkstra noticed how the sessions aroused profound thoughts and emotions in the children and how much they had to say about the works.
Rineke Dijkstra is one of Holland’s most influential contemporary artists. She has participated in several major international exhibitions, including two Venice Biennales, 1997 and 2001, and at the International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video in New York in 2003. In Sweden, she participated in the 2002 Performing Bodies exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Holland.
Rineke Dijkstra’s video installation is part of a series of exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall that presents new works by artists who have played a decisive role in contemporary art. Previous instalments of the series include films by Salla Tykkä, Adrian Paci and Ann-Sofi Sidén.