Ilke Gers

artistic research - experimental - installation - language - abstract

I'm a visual artist, working with site-specific installation, text, drawing and publishing to explore the relationship between the body, movement and language. Investigating the human body in designed systems, installations often take the form of ground works that are made through movement and open-ended processes that are contingent on spatial conditions, physical interaction and time.

Intervening in the normative mechanisms of communication and circulation, my work destabilizes the assumed neutrality and fixed nature of the built environment, language forms and behavior codes to experiment with how given structures can be re-imagined by generating a space for encounter and experience.

  • Portfolio
  • Activities
  • Awarded
  • Contact

    • Desire Lines

    Project

    • 01-10-2020 t/m 21-10-2020
    • In collaboration with: NDSM-Werf
    • Location: NDSM Wharf, Amsterdam
    • A site specific work in which chalk lines, curves and shapes connect the various spaces that make up NDSM Werf. These markings act like a language or mark-making system, made in response to the use and rhythms of the area. The markings in turn affect how the space is used, as pedestrians, bikes and cars respond to the non-directional, non-instructional markings, referring to 'desire lines' as informal pathways created through the intuitive use of a space over time.
    • https://www.ndsm.nl/en/location/desire-lines-2020-by-ilke-gers/

    postscript

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 16-02-2020 t/m 15-03-2020
    • Location: LLS Palace, Antwerp
    • For eight consecutive days, I made a new chalk marking each day with a chalk marker as a performative action. The drawings respond to the environment of the exhibition space, including its history, architecture, and neighborhood, as well as the audience present. This includes references to road markings, letter shapes, parts of letter shapes and choreographic 'scripts' as a kind of mapping of space and reflection of its temporality.
    • http://llspaleis.be/expo/ilke-gers/

    Street Games

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 21-06-2021 t/m 29-08-2021
    • In collaboration with: Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre
    • Location: Southbank Centre, London
    • A composition of re-imagined street games, around the buildings of Southbank Centre. The project is based in the history of improvised and made up games, particularly by kids in urban neighborhoods without designated parks, forced to play in the street––implicating city planning and gentrification. I devised different compositions that reference existing street games such as hop scotch, ball games, and a local historical dance called The Lambeth Walk; a working class walking dance from the 1930s
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIN8c5174nY

    The Same Ground

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 23-06-2023 t/m 05-11-2023
    • In collaboration with: TABAKALERA
    • Location: TABAKALERA, Donostia-San Sebastian
    • Vinyl floor work running through the exhibition and public spaces of Tabakalera. Commissioned along with a selection of works from the collection of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, it functions as a temporal floor score, shifting between language and gesture. With no fixed orientation or direction, the work extends the exhibition through the buildings' walls and corridors, and requires movement to be viewed or read. It breaks in and out of grids and order, suggesting slippages in linear structures
    • http://ilkegers.info/Thesameground.html

    Acknowledgments

      Publication

    • Move along

    • 2018
    • artist book
    • Onomatopoeia - Ilke Gers
      Publication

    • The Carpenter of your neighborhood

    • 2020
    • artist book
    • Dolce - Ilke Gers, Text by Eleni Micahelidic
      Publication

    • Charles is Charles

    • 2018
    • Poetry book – translations of the Poetry of Rieneke Minderman-Grobben
    • Action Publishing Collective - Rieneke Minderman Grobben, Translated by Johanna Monk, edited by Ilke Gers and Quenton Miller