Engulfed in a world of increasing transformation we are becoming aware of the feeling that we are standing still in an ever changing landscape which leaves us little space to take meaningful action. Fixed in Transition implies the seizure of a moment in time, such as freezing an image in a film, which offers a position of awareness and reflection.

Joost Bakker presents the work Free Fall in the dome of the exhibition space. In this ‘living drawing’, -a term the artist prefers for his animations in order to designate more precisely the form in-between drawing and film which retains the tension between the still moment and the movement of time-, we perceive a figure which appears to plummet. Through a headphone we hear something which suggests an endless descending sound, enforcing the sensation that the figure is falling. In reality neither the image nor the sound change position and both are caught in this seemingly endless fall, without beginning or end, suspended between light hearted freedom and tragic consequence.

Anno Dijkstra’s work Cunning Empathy takes place in between the fleetingness of the media image and the permanence of the monument, in a study of the nature of remembrance and our relationship to its image. This performative installation makes us complicit in the act of exposing small images kept covered, which protects and displays the vulnerability of the art work and the intimacy of the encounter. The revealed sculptures are three dimensional copies of images from the media – prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a child rescued from the debris of an earth quake, a stone throwing Palestine, a starving African child – dramas mediated by the camera which we are passive witnesses to. Staging our encounter with these otherwise fleeting images in the here and now allows us to reflect on and investigate our relationship to these images, which alternately repulse and attract.

Fixed in Transition brings two apparently different artists in an interesting dialogue. Finding each other in the dedication to the craftsmanship of their work – Joost Bakkers creates his animations in precise lines with pencil and erasure while the sculptures of Anno Dijkstra are the result of a classical investigation of sculptural problems-, concepts such as time and space, passiveness and action, fleetingness and permanence, finality and endlessness are elaborated in the work of both artists on different levels. The essential lightness and tragicomic humour of Free Fall played out in the height of the dome contrasts and complements the gravity and intimacy of Cunning Emphathy.