Minne Kersten

Interview by Eugenie Dalland

Minne Kersten’s spacious studio is flooded with a soft light that streams in through tall, narrow windows. We're speaking over Zoom; she's in Paris, I'm in New York. The Dutch artist's multidisciplinary work exists between a triumvirate of installation, film, and painting, often in the form of independently constructed rooms filled with the objects of daily life, which she then shoots. These films function both as a documentary of the installation and a form of storytelling that subtly dramatizes the theme that animates many of her works—namely, what it means to be in dialogue with the past. Kersten’s interests lie not in imposing a specific narrative (a word she uses often in our interview), but rather in looking at the residue of that narrative, and considering what is left behind, psychologically but also physically, by the major events of our lives.

Much of her work is inspired by literature. A raven pecks and tears at a wall in Constant Companion (2021), its symbolic status as harbinger of destruction echoing through the viewer’s thoughts. In her exhibition, “ghosts don’t like new things” (2023), three poets were invited to read and contribute poems that emphasized the capacity of language to materialize the immaterial. At the heart of her practice is a nuanced understanding of stories, a kind of magpie approach that gathers layer upon layer of meaning, overlaying the present with the past. Kersten’s work haunts and informs her viewer, reminding them that the spaces we live in are often still filled with the life and activity they once witnessed.

Eugenie Dalland (ED): You’ve described your approach to making art as “literary.” In what way?

Minne Kersten (MK): At school I studied literature and art, how you create narrative, but also how you create narrative within a space. I was trying to write, but it didn't really work out [laugher]. I felt I didn't do characters well. But anyway, that was in the beginning. I think with every work that I make, it's almost the same process of working up to a book. A book is a space in which a story unfolds. It doesn’t have to be linear or narrative, but it's still a container somehow. For me, when I work on a show, I think of making an exhibition as a narrative process, like how I place the elements in an exhibition space. There can be paintings, drawings, installation, and video, but it's what happens in between those elements where you start to make links. I borrow a lot from literature, like the devices you can use, or a kind of suspense, or it's a series of unfolding, the setting of a person, or the setting of a stage.

ED: Let’s talk about one of your literary influences, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the 19th century short story which your latest video and installation, Where I’m Calling From (2025), is partly inspired by. I read it last week while researching your work and was fascinated by the story’s engagement with interior spaces and decoration, specifically the wallpaper in an attic, to convey a woman’s descent into psychosis at the hands of her husband and society. How did you come across this story?

MK: A friend of mine who studied gothic literature referenced it to me, though I think I read it in school when I was 16. At the time, I was already looking into making my own wallpaper, actually, because I was working on this project where I was inviting [moths] inside of the space, so that book became an important reference. It's a really great example of how architecture is actually the mental space that the protagonist lives in. The wallpaper in the attic she spends most of her time in functions, in that case, as a prison, she's locked in completely, the pattern of the wallpaper is barred. But also, it functions as an escape. I think one reading of the work is that it's about a woman who falls into psychosis, but you could also read it as that she's actually freeing herself from this confinement, by writing. She starts to imagine, or I guess hallucinate, this figure behind the pattern, and she tries to free the figure. So I think if you read it as a horror story, it’s very scary, and she’s kind of losing it, but it could also be a way to transcend through literature.

While I was making that work, which is set in an attic, my grandmother passed away and I had to clear out her attic. She lived in an era where lots of women didn't have the opportunity to study or to make their own choices in how they wanted their life to go. But she was an amazing fashion designer, she made fantastic dresses, and the whole attic was filled with homemade clothes and patterns. It's a whole life lived in a shadow somehow. I used her clothes in this attic installation. So the fictive character of “The Yellow Wallpaper” became kind of combined with my grandmother in my head. As a viewer, you get the suggestion of a presence. I was also reading Edgar Allan Poe. He had a philosophy of furnishing, in which he writes that wallpaper is like a trap, your mind can’t escape because you don't see the corners in a room anymore.

Where I'm Calling From, 2024; installation, wood, silkscreen wallpaper, various objects, carousel slide projector with 200 slides

ED: That's a very Edgar Allan Poe philosophy! Domestic interiors have often historically been designated as the realm of women, and that's obviously very much a part of the narrative in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Do such historical considerations factor into the way that you think about interior domestic spaces?

MK: I think it's a question that came up more recently with the last work [The Same Room, (2023)], because the first ones didn't have a specific gender. It was more focused on what happens if you invite agents inside the space other than a human presence. Like how do you look at an interior space through the eyes of something that's interpreted as causing upheaval or disruption, like water or a raven, which have very specific connotations, such as to chaos or to death? But with the work that I made with the water, I did feel that it was more like a teenage boy’s bedroom somehow. In general, the works become clearer to me after I've done them than beforehand. You start with one idea, and then it's such a layered process that it can change years after, the feeling of it.

ED: I really love the work you’re referencing, The Same Room (2023), where you built a bedroom, filled it with water, and shot a film to document the aftermath. I was really drawn to something in both that installation and Where I’m Calling From, which is how convincing the messiness of those spaces was [laughter]! It felt totally unstaged, which is so interesting because obviously you were arranging these spaces with intention. Being inside someone’s personal space, their home, always provides an intimate view into who they are, but I feel like messiness is even more intimate—it's like a map of their unconscious movement around a space, how they use it. Scattered books, forgotten mail, used dishes, clothes on the floor, the forgotten detritus that make up our lived experience. This might sound like sort of a weird question, but do you study messiness? How did you create such an authentic rendition of it?

MK: I think you can't really invent mess, it's just the effect of how an action turns out, of how I work. Sometimes I have to move an installation and its objects around multiple times. Let's say I construct it first in my studio, then transport it somewhere else to shoot, then deconstruct and reconstruct it in a museum again. Once it’s in an exhibition, it has had a whole journey already. Some installations bare traces of water damage, others are torn and ripped apart or keep other traces from the shoot. It creates its own history in a way.

"You can't really invent mess, it's just the effect of how an action turns out, of how I work."

ED: In the film you made for The Same Room, there was something almost disturbing about watching the bedroom fill with water, maybe because it held within it the inevitability of the room’s decay. Is decay also something that interests you?

MK: I guess it relates to the idea of nostalgia, which in itself is connected to ruin and collapse. If we get to know the world by what gets left behind, then how do we relate to the past? I think the feeling of decay is also related to loss. When you're encountering experiences of grief or loss, it's such a disruption. You open the door and it's there and you just have to invite it in. For me, it's about visualizing that feeling of transition and change. It's not just a negative thing, it's about trying to understand and give it space. As a reference, there was a book I read by the British writer Max Porter, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers. It's fantastic. I was really touched by it, because it’s really not literal, how it's written. The main character opens the door and there's this figure, black feathers everywhere, and she's coming inside, and she kind of comes to represent the [main character’s wife] who passed away. I admire how sometimes language can say how something is, the feeling or experience of it, instead of the blunt reality.

ED: Language’s capacity for metaphor.

MK: Exactly.

The Same Room, 2022; wood, carpet, furniture, lights, clothes, personal items

ED: When you visit a place for the first time, whether it's a museum or a grocery store or a friend's home, do you find yourself reading the space, or the objects in that space?

MK: I think you never enter someplace neutral. It can either be the weather or the things you did before that become part of that experience. Or the things you've been reading. Very often I’m in my head with the fiction that I’m reading, or poetry, or film, and that atmosphere I'm bringing along also. Right now I’m preparing a work for a place in Amsterdam that's a contemporary art center, but also the oldest church in town, from the 1300s. It's a huge space, it's been lived through a lot, and the city is built around it. That, to me, is the ultimate challenge—how do you collect that feeling into the process of making something? On the first site visit, we went up these two really tall spiral staircases, like 25 meters high, into an attic space. The attic looked super normal, like a normal space of a house or a barn. But then there were these holes in the floor covered by small wooden tiles that you lift up… and you look 30 meters down to the floor! There’s the feeling that you’re going into a building, seeing this view that a visitor might not see, and asking, "How does the building look at itself?”

"I think you never enter someplace neutral. It can either be the weather or the things you did before that become part of that experience. Or the things you've been reading."

ED: How did you become interested in interior spaces and environments?

MK: I think maybe it started with working in film and video, the feeling that so much evaporates from an action after it’s been shot. Maybe also with the idea that spaces have the capacity to be receptive to things that happen inside them. I became really interested in these 19th century pseudoscientific theories like the “stone tape theory,” how walls could record and replay certain times from the past. It's a way to ask, “Where do the very impactful events leave their marking after they're gone? What's their residue? How do spaces witness the things that happen inside them?” And for me, that's also a gateway into cinema and film. In film, you can have a space, a room, become a protagonist—you can feel that it's really one of the characters.

Whenever I get to work with a location that has a really strong history, I look into the previous functions of the space. So in that sense, stone tape theory, and also place memory, they're a bit like links. Maybe there’s a Genius loci, a kind of spirit, inside of a space. I'm not sure if I'm that spiritual, that I bluntly believe it or not, but I think it's a very interesting concept. These people made their own devices to scratch stones and try to resurface a past. They used these mechanisms to try to prove that the things they felt or sensed had a physical manifestation. The things that we would say are invisible, how do you place them?

"Where do the very impactful events leave their marking after they're gone? What's their residue?"

ED: What’s an early memory you have of a space that you remember vividly?

MK: I remember my granddad sewed a tablecloth that he hung over a table, and it made the underneath space into a house. I spent a lot of time there.

ED: How old were you?

MK: Maybe four. For a four-year-old, that space is a house!

ED: It absolutely is!

Constant Companion, 2021; installation, various materials

MK: I had a very personal entry into how interior spaces can function as containers for lives. And I also consider possessions as the gateway into the human psyche. Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires of their owners. With the absence of the owner, the value attached to the objects changes.

"I consider possessions as the gateway into the human psyche. Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires of their owners. With the absence of the owner, the value attached to the objects changes."

ED: What are you reading right now?

MK: A collection of short stories called The Houseguest, by the writer Amparo Dávila. It’s really great and beautifully written. There are lots of cats terrorizing everyone in really strange ways [laughter].

ED: You’ve placed moths and ravens in your previous works, will cats make an appearance in your upcoming installation?

MK: I’d like to film a black cat in the attic of the church, but the ideas still need to come together. But yeah, I'm really interested in cats right now [laughter]! They have such a different sense of communication.

ED: What will the film component for that installation look like?

MK: There will be a series of five videos of circular screens in the church, almost like you're looking into the eye of one of those spiral staircases. I was looking at a lot of early cinema machines, and thinking of questions like, “how does a moving image make you believe that it's actually there?” I thought that would be interesting to combine with this previously religious architecture.

ED: So drawing a kind of parallel between the leap of faith required in both religion and film.

MK: I was asking the question, “How have our images of ghosts, or things that are invisible around us, been informed by early photography and cinema techniques?” And I wanted to place that in this more religious context, which I think played a role in it as well.

ED: How do you plan the film element for each of your installations?

MK: Each project is really building up to this moment of shooting, which is very experimental. I don't really make a storyboard. I don't imagine it in my head because it's more like an event. And then, after a build-up like that, I need to calm down again. I do lots of paintings. But painting is something that goes on all the time. The paintings are either before a project as a way to understand what I want to do, or afterwards to digest what I did.

ED: Watching the films you made for Where I’m Calling From and The Same Room, I was reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical film Mirror from 1975.

MK: Watching that movie was a profound experience for me!

ED: It was for me too, it's like watching not just a memory, but the process of memory. And there's so many interior spaces in that movie that are destroyed by water or fire, or time, as well.

MK: Yes exactly, it’s like watching the reconstruction of memory, and the attempt to keep it. It’s really beautiful. Maybe it’s a loss in itself because, through film, you can get close to the feeling of how it was or used to be, but you cannot bring it back. It’s very strange. Tarkovsky reconstructed the house of his childhood for that film.

ED: Right, exactly, even the sets in the film were part of the process of his memory.

MK: Still, it’s a different experience because then you have a whole film crew that you have to deal with in your private space. But that movie seemed to move like water itself, almost.

Ghosts Don't Like New Things, 2023; site-specific installation, dimension variable, chandeliers, publication with 80 photographs and 3 commissioned poems, edition 2000x

ED: What do you hope a viewer of your work will take away from the experience?

MK: I welcome speculation. For me, exhibitions function as narrative spaces. I position different elements in space in my exhibitions and see them as unfolding narratives, aiming to first address the visitors' feelings before they draw conclusions. I think the great potential of art is its ability to remain open and to resist closure, so that it can exist in different ways for different people. I am well aware that the moment you place something into the world, it is no longer yours alone. The associations and cultural background of the viewer determine how something is read. Therefore, I don’t focus on the plot but rather on the residue of an event—that which remains when the core of the story, the road from A to B, is filtered out. When you, as a viewer, arrive after something has just happened and miss out on the cause-effect sequence, you have to rely on fiction. I believe that imagination sometimes reveals more about reality than reality itself. It is up to the viewer to come up with their own, new story, for which I hope the work leaves enough clues.

Eugenie Dalland is a writer and editor based in upstate New York. Her profiles, reviews, essays, and stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and Cultured. She published and edited the arts & culture magazine Riot of Perfume from 2011-2019. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is working on a novel.