Video Performances & Video-Installations
Ellen Schippers is a multi-disciplinary artist, who combines wearable sculptures, performance, dance, music, light and poetry in theatrical video-installations. She creates a “fantasy” world that is continuously bursting at the seams.
Her work is about gender, like stereotypical male and female images, ideals of beauty and about the contradiction between image versus authenticity. Schippers strips fixed images by inflating and deconstructing them and reveals the authentic emotions that are hidden behind these selfmade images.
Schippers has presented Live Performances on location in galleries, in theatres, at cultural institutions and festivals like: De Kleine Komedie, De Brakke Grond, Panama, Escape, The Melkweg, Mazzo, Maison Descartes (French Cultural Embassy) and the Vondelpark Open Air Theatre in Amsterdam, the Hippodrome Theatre in Londen, the World Science Fiction Congress and the Wiener Sommer Symposion in Vienna. Seducing visitors with powerful images and plunging them into a suggestive atmosphere.
Latest exhibitions and presentations
2011 The Salon, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam
2010 International Womens Art Festival in Aleppo, Syria
2010 Frauensehnsucht, opening by Heleen Mees, solo exhibition in Loods 6 Amsterdam. Second edition of a triptych about gender
2010 Mosse Lecture about Art & Gender at the University of Amsterdam
2010 Women Inc. Festival in Amsterdam
2010 Silent Cry, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam
2009 The Salon, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam
2009 Guest lectures about Art & Gender at the University of Amsterdam
2009 Video Art & Gender of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with artists like Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin and Marina Abramovitz
2008 Image & I-magic, solo exhibition (opening by Bianca du Mortier, curator of the Rijksmuseum and Ellen ten Damme) First edition of a triptych about gender
Bianca du Mortier, curator of the Rijksmuseum, about Image & I-magic: “Ellen Schippers does not fear to play with taboos and fantasies, either. This play with feelings and physical appearance is what makes her work so powerful”
Background
Ellen Schippers was educated in textile art in Amsterdam, in performance-art and textile art at the Vrije Academie of The Hague and in video at Open Studio in Amsterdam.
Since 2009 Schippers is a member of the Artist Society Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam
Collaboration
Schippers has collaborated in projects with various artists such as Penck, Mirko Krabbé and Peter Giele; the poets George Moorman and Arthur Lava; the composers Bo van de Graaf (I-Compani) and Hans Asselbergs.
Her work was photographed among others by Erwin Olaf, Angèle Etoundi Essamba, Wim van de Hulst and Cindy Marler.