Select 86 objects that you have kept for over 10 years and that you are attached too, but you do not really need. Catalogue all of the items. Give them away.

We are closer to having than to being. Objects represent fragments of the world that surrounds us. They define the boundaries of a place we can not leave. In which the objects own us as much as we own them.

And yet we care so little for the lives of things. We are such poor neighbours to the things that surround us, locking them up in boxes and subjecting them to our narratives, the fictions and dreams we weave around our past. The objects never had the ambition to become icons.

In an ethnographic museum, among a jumble of objects from distant sources was a show on Polynesian artefacts. A text explained that within Polynesian cultures your richness is defined by what you can give away instead of what you own. The more you give away the more valuable become the things that stay behind.

Paradise is this:

Item #12:

Two books, One Card: ‘For My Special Daughter’, ‘For My Very Sweetest Daughter’. ‘For My Daughter I Love You’.

Gift from mother, hand signed: 2010, 2006, 2003.

Item #34:

Plastic text: ‘SUZUKI SWIFT’.

From first car, sold by father for 100 Euro without telling me, only remaining piece.

Item #56:

53 Paper coffee cups. Consumed and collected during first ever visit to New York City for 53 days in 2000.

The viewer can enter and leave taking one object with them. They will be signed by the artist.

In her photographs, videos, installations and performances Melanie Bonajo questions our present believe systems and opposes its mechanical point of view by generating an artificial universe.

She works with fictive interventions blending seemingly opposing elements into the everyday and ordinary. These often carry their own logic and are a symbolic intercom of confused mystical ideas, emotional patterns and states of mind lingering between our depth and the relatively thin consciousness by which we govern our daily existence.

Melanie Bonajo [1978, Heerlen] lives and works in Amsterdam / Berlin. Her photographs have been exhibited in international art institutions, such as Institute Neérlandais/Paris, Foam /Amsterdam, Modern Art Museum Ljubljana, Kohun Museum of Modern Art, Seoul and PPOW Gallery/ New York, SMBA/Amsterdam, Programm, Berlin, Stedelijk museum/ Amsterdam, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem. She published 3 books I have a Room with Everything 2009, Furniture Bondage 2009, Modern Life of the Soul, 2008, was the winner of the Dutch Young Artist Award 2003 and of the book price Pup Award 2007. In 2010 she finished a residency period on the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.