Paul Hendrikse

Paul Hendrikse creates extentions of cultural or artistic legacies. Hendrikse is fascinated by the ambigous space that occurs when one extents an existing work with it’s quasi-identic reproduction. The added work parasites the original, is dependent on it, and does not have a legitimacy without it. But the added work also undermines the existing work, because it is never an exact copy, and therefor has a space of it’s own. Hendrikse regularly sets up collaborative working-models with other "producers". His production varies in medium and form; a book, a performance, a story, an object or a video can all be outcomes of the artistic research.

In recent years his work has been focussing on legacies of persons that acquired a speculative, ambiguous, or over-determined place in history. Examples of this are the works The Last Acquisition, a performative work around Lode Craeybeckx, the former mayor of the city of Antwerp, Belgium, a socialist, modernist and initiator of Middelheim sculpture garden in Antwerp. The project Hauntology of Smoke and Ochre, that consists of a book, a performance and an exhibition, he started from the life and work of the South African poet Ingrid Jonker (1933– 1965).

Hendrikse finished a postgraduate at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He showed his work recently at S.M.A.K. in Gent, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp and Smart Project Space, Amsterdam. He collobarated (amongst others) with Martin Nachbar (performer), Alphonso Lingis (philosopher), Hester van Hasselt (performer), Carola Bärtschiger (actrice) and Katja Gretzinger (grafic designer). He was an artist in residence at Wiels in Brussels, Brut, Vienna, Laboratoires Aubervilliers in Paris and Gasthuis, Amsterdam at The Bag Factory in Johannesburg.