Artist Statement
Bart Houwers (1997) comes from the Dutch countryside, from a family of farmers. Through rationalization and modernization, the countryside and landscape has been undergoing severe changes for decades. These changes have resonated with the people who live there, and in his work Houwers investigate these changes. Through various mediums, notions like: (spatial) memory, micro-histories, craft, tradition, guilt and loss are being explored. His artistic practice deals partly and in idiosyncratic ways with the protestant tradition. A tradition he grew up in, and in which, after the iconoclastic waves of the Reformation, the Word became central. Which is why he often uses pre-existing materials inrelation to language. There is a sense of playing with quotes, at the same time it transcends the quote and manipulates what is quoted. Resulting in,seemingly, incoherent fragments.
