Tineke van Veen is exhibiting her work at the Enschede Photo Manifestation.
The Fotomanifestatie Enschede has this year’s title Human Landscapes and addresses the question of how we interact with nature and shape it. Unconscious judgments or traditional ideas about a cultivated landscape return in the citywide photo exhibition.
Concordia invites Tineke van Veen to present her work during the Fotomanifestatie. Tineke investigates the disrupted relationship between humans and nature, our experience with ‘post-human’ landscapes caused by radioactive radiation. This radiation poses a threat that we cannot perceive with our senses, you cannot feel, see, hear or smell it. She traveled to, among other places, Fukushima and Fort de Vaujours in France, and documented the landscape and developments there. The resulting photo series and films form an interpretation of an alienated reality.
Tineke van Veen studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and pursued an MA in Film and Photography at Leiden University. Her research and practice revolve around the concept of ‘feeling safe’. Since 2012 the focus of her work has been on the nuclear landscape.
Tineke van Veen
Tineke van Veen is a visual artist based in the Netherlands, graduated from the KABK in The Hague and with MA studies in Film and Photography at Leiden University, whose research and practice revolve around the concept of ‘feeling safe’. Since 2012 the focus of her work has been on the nuclear landscape. Photography is her primary medium but she works simultaneously with film to visualize the hidden threats of radiation. Her work has been shown at national and international exhibitions and film festivals.
Exposure to radioactivity in a nuclear contaminated landscape can be life-threatening because our senses do not recognize it. The concept of ‘exposure’ is the starting point for a series of new photographic works. An investigation into how the nuclear landscape can be explored today and how this landscape in turn can explore us, thereby opening the research process and creating space for active engagement with the non-human. New techniques and materials are explored that affect the photographs and add new layers. The photos form an interpretation of an alienated reality.
Unsettling Landscapes
In Unsettling Landscapes I investigate the disrupted relationship between humans and nature, our experience with ‘post-human’ landscapes caused by radioactive radiation. This nuclear radiation poses a threat that we cannot perceive with our senses, you cannot feel, see, hear or smell it. How do we relate to these landscapes?
Phenomena such as radioactive contamination are difficult to describe or visualize because they are so vast in time and scale that they are hard to grasp, but at the same time they are so closely present. The feeling of alienation and intimacy are the starting points for the photo series Unsettling Landscapes.
During my stay in Fukushima, Japan, in 2014 I was confronted with the consequences of the nuclear disaster of 2011, when a tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant. Nuclear contamination affected the landscape of Fukushima. The consequences for the landscape and the cleanup of it have been the starting point for a short experimental film and a documentary, as well as experiments with cyanotype, an old photographic process.
In my most recent project I investigate Fort de Vaujours in France, 20 km from Paris.
Between 2016 and 2020 I visited Fort de Vaujours in France several times to investigate this former test site where France’s first nuclear experiments were developed and carried out. This abandoned and closed-off site has been sold to France’s largest gypsum company, which wants to mine the ground with all the consequences this entails.
In addition to photos made with a self-built camera I recorded, together with Barbara Prezelj, the short film Unsettling Dust at this site.