PRINT January 2002

Kate Bush on Saskia Olde Wolbers

“LET’S, IN OUR HEADS, GO FORWARD TO THE YEAR 2016, the year in which I will be conceived.” So begins Kilowatt Dynasty, 2000, an extravagant story scripted by Dutch video artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, which involves a young Chinese girl, a huge dam, a teleshopping empire, a washing machine, and a vast subaqueous world. The narrator recounts the tale of her future conception, an event that arises when her father, an environmental activist who has spent years handcuffed to a fence in a bid to stop the dam, kidnaps her mother, a TV presenter on a teleshopping program and wearer of a “tangy-colored two-piece.” As the unborn child talks, the camera floats over a breathtakingly strange, oneiric world—a shimmering mindscape of viscous liquids and translucent architectural forms. We could be in the womb with the fetus, underwater in a marine nature documentary, or—as you notice that this liquid habitat looks suspiciously like the inside of a plastic water bottle—someplace altogether more ordinary.

Olde Wolbers divides her time between London and Amsterdam, and her work has been seen in exhibitions across Europe, including, in the last year alone, the Tirana Biennale; “Casino” at SMAK, Ghent; and “Mindset,” a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Her narrative videos are prompted by human dramas culled from the newspaper or radio. Mandy Allwood, for example, a British woman who became pregnant with octuplets and then notorious for selling her story to the tabloids, inspired the lead character in Octet, 1997; the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the imminent flooding of an entire province in China provides the backdrop for Kilowatt Dynasty. Onto these real-life events Olde Wolbers embroiders fantastical rambling stories, told in voiceovers set to bizarre scenographies that look as if they were computer generated but are in fact entirely handmade in the studio and shot in digital video (in one case with a miniature camera). Her protagonists hatch ambitiously creative schemes that tend to go horribly wrong: Take Sasha, a Russian girl looking for love, who wreaks havoc inside the Hotel Cosmos when she makes a foaming artwork in the bathroom to impress her blind date, an American gallerist (Cosmos,1998). Or poor Luis Zarzuela, the star of Day-Glo, 1999, an Andalusian market gardener who, in a bid to make a fast buck, creates a virtual-reality theme park only to discover that his beloved wife is committing adultery—with a virtual version of his younger self. Olde Wolbers’s characters become victims of their excessive imaginations and end up unable to distinguish their dreams from reality. Funny and fresh, these stories of individual calamity are contemporary parables that warn of the dangers of confusing the virtual with the real—and of the hubris of creative enterprise in an ever more technologically determined world.

Critic and curator KATE BUSH has been senior programmer at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, since 1998, where she has mounted shows of the work of Amy Adler, Corinne Day, Erwin Wurm, and Malerie Marder, among others. In 2001 she curated for Madrid’s water tower-cum-artist’s space, Canal de Isabel II, “The Fantastic Recurrence of Certain Situations,” a group exhibition that introduced London-based artists Shizuka Yokomizo, Sophy Rickett, Dryden Goodwin, and Julie Henry. Bush is currently worklng on a large survey of recent developments in British photography and video. Her writing on artists such as Darren Almond, Juergen Teller, Joseph Grigely, and Jaki Irvine has appeared in Frieze, European Photography, The Guardian, Parkett, Artforum, and other publications.