The Krazy House (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK

2008
Rineke Dijkstra

Four-channel HD video installation, sound, color. 5 portraits
32 min. in loop

She asked five young people to dance to their favourite music in a studio that had been specially set up at a Liverpool nightclub. Immersed in the dark, blue-tinged setting, the dancers move against a featureless white background. They are completely absorbed, losing themselves in their own image and the image they want to portray to others. “The most important thing was to recreate the feeling of a natural situation, which is why I worked with a small camera and a minimal team. […] The dancers seem to abandon themselves to the music and are absorbed in the present moment. They forget who they are a bit; it gives us a glimpse of their personality,” explains the artist.

Hangs

Pop & Music

From 3 June 2015 to 4 January 2016
Crossing views

From 23 September 2020 to 3 January 2021

Rineke Dijkstra has been revisiting the portraiture genre since the early 1990s.

She uses photography and video to explore the truth through her young subjects: teenagers, freshly recruited soldiers, amateur toreadors, women giving birth. In their faces and poses she records signs of their confrontation with their changing bodies. These anonymous subjects retain a mystery, paradoxically maintained by the treatment of the image: the frontal framing, with crude or subdued lighting, maintains a distance. For Dijkstra it is not as important to record reality as to capture by surprise, almost without the subject realising, a growing awareness.