The Saint Louis Art Museum announces the August 1 opening of Saskia Olde Wolbers: Placebo, the fourteenth installation in the Museum's New Media Series.
Saskia Olde Wolbers (Dutch, born 1971) creates films in which her hand-built environments become the primary vehicles for expression, suggesting both the physical and metaphorical spaces between people. Her visually absent characters are represented through a spoken narrative and settings that become abstracted and grotesque in response to the psychological states of the protagonists. Rooted in the lives of real people, Wolbers' films often probe the role of deception in human experience.
Placebo is loosely based on the life of a man who spent 18 years pretending to be a doctor for the World Health Organization in Geneva. In Wolbers' reimagining of the story, an unnamed and unseen narrator wakes in a hospital bed after being in a car accident with her lover, Jean. Over the course of the film, the narrator's gently probing voice reveals that Jean—whom she had believed to be a doctor with a family—was neither a husband nor a physician. Because he was no longer able to reconcile his internally constructed self with the outside world, he chose to forfeit their lives by intentionally causing the crash rather than lose his fictive identity.
Stuck in a hospital where Jean supposedly worked and where both lovers now struggle to survive, Placebo's narrator is fused with the site of her unfolding narrative. Liquid slips, bubbles and pops over the walls’ wiry frames, forming gaping holes as she recounts the unraveling of Jean's lies and her own prolonged self-deception in believing them. Echoing the characters' attempts to maintain or understand their crumbling reality, the architecture struggles to maintain its physical existence, denying all solidity.
Wolbers lives and works in London. She has shown extensively at such international locations as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Britain, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Her honors include winning the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2003 and the Beck's Futures prize in 2004.
Curated by Rene DeVoe Mertz, the Museum's former Aronson graduate intern for contemporary art, Placebo will be on view in Gallery 301. -- www.stlouis.art.museum
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