Suzan Boogaerdt & Bianca van der Schoot

A dormitory. Motionless sleeping figures. What images pass through our subconscious in the depths of sleep, and what wisdom might we draw from them? This is the question that guided the Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot duo in Fremdkörper (literally: “foreign body”). For the two Dutch artists, this piece takes on the dimension of a ceremony, a rite of passage to the limits of consciousness. Fremdkörper was created in 2020, when Bianca van der Schoot began to dream at the time of the first lockdown. Her experience led to the duo’s interest in public hypnosis sessions on YouTube, Buddhist contemplations and research into sleep rituals in ancient Greek temples. With Fremdkörper, Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot extended a series entitled Future Fossils, which explores what artistic creation can mean if humans are no longer at the centre of the world. Combining elements of performance and visual installation, Fremdkörper places the audience at the bedside of sleeping characters, all the better to dream of a more liveable future.

Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, who trained in Amsterdam, have been working together since 1999. Known as a duo under the name Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot, their pieces, at the intersection of performance and visual arts, look at the relationship between humans, nature and technology. After exploring visual culture in the series Visual Statements (2011-2014), they worked on digital creatures in Future Fossils, and are currently developing a series entitled Rooms for Transformation.