V1 GALLERY IS PLEASED TO PRESENT
I’m like you Mm - I like you
SOLO EXHIBITION BY NINA JAN BEIER
Nina Jan Beier is interested in relations and the field between people. She works within the staged photograph with the aim to document the situation she creates and the consequence it has for the people she drags into it.
Nina photographs her friends in different situations, which arise partly naturally, partly motivated by the camera. These documented stagings are all firmly founded in a situation, a place, a relationship. While living in London she has undertaken the task of recreating all these photographs with a cast of new friends that remind her of each one she has previously photographed. This way Nina explores the span of the staged and the restaged and the social experiment in the photographic project.
'Play - with light, with limbs, with whatever props are at hand' is enough to inspire Beier, and she acts it out and documents it with exuberance and fluency. Staged photography with the body can grate if it looks too much like rude marionette work. There are more than enough ways in which contemporary humans are made to feel far away from themselves; people should not be bent out of shape to satisfy an artist. Beier is neither Svengali nor egomaniac. The gentle fictions in her photographs speak of the freedom of friendship and the protected, hermetic environment that it provides. Tenderness thrives there, and identity remains an open question, as it should.' -William Pym
Criticks - pick in ARTFORUM, Feb 2005
