Rineke Dijkstra - I See You Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP)
The MEP is proud to announce a major exhibition of video works by Rineke Dijkstra. Taking over an entire floor of the museum, Dijkstra will install four of her signature video installations, all presented for the first time in a Parisian museum.
With a career spanning more than three decades, Dijkstra has established her reputation with incredible sensitivity to the ethical and creative contract put in place when an artist sets out to capture the appearance and personality of a human subject with the camera lens, whether as still or moving images. Her work poses essential questions about the ways in which people present themselves to be seen, and the ways in which this auto-representation changes over time, through age and experience, and through learned codes of socialization.
The video works selected for the MEP exhibition deal exclusively with how younger people look and present themselves to be seen as portrait subjects in the process of establishing their identities, whether as school students, performers and/or consumers of visual culture. In many ways, through holding up the camera to face her subjects, Dijkstra challenges us all to re-think how we look and attach meaning to images of others and how we understand our roles in contemporary society.