Het Plafond; a space for the arts and for culture in the home of Willem Besselink and Guus Vreeburg
Gedempte Zalmhaven 761, 3011 BT Rotterdam / NL

Simone Meier (CH) & Jennifer Ross (UK)
'Private Peep Show'
January 24 - February 28, 2009

informatie in het Nederlands
pictures

Private Peep Show: displaying your 'self'
Apart from its high ceiling, from which Het Plafond (‘the ceiling’) takes its name, the space is also characterised by its large window facing the sidewalk. It is a true ‘shop window’, connecting the public space outdoors and the indoor space. The window acts like an ‘interface’ between the ‘public’ sphere of the street, and the semi private yet semi public character of Het Plafond.
Young artists Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross have chosen to focus their installation ‘Private Peep Show’ (PPS) exactly onto this situation, not just physically/materially, but also conceptually. In PPS they investigate the relationship between ‘the private sphere’ and ‘the public sphere’, or more specifically between ‘private life’ and ‘public life’ – the ways in which nowadays ‘privacy’ is being visible publically, involving ‘displaying yourself’ and ‘peeping in’. Even more specifically, Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross put this to the test by displaying their own private lives and the glamourized version of their lives, and inviting us to ‘take a peek’.
Thus, Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross, like none of the Plafond-artists did before them (with Sjoerd Knibbeler in 2006 as an exception), really exploit the second of Het Plafond’s basic characteristics in a truely site specific installation: it’s all about ‘displaying themselves’ and ‘us peeking in’.

Come and have a peek at Het Plafond
Het Plafond has no regular opening hours, but opens up to the sidewalk at Gedempte Zalmhaven through a huge window. The installation ‘Private Peep Show' will thus be visible day and night.

Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross
‘Private Peep Show’ (PPS) is a collaboration project of two young artists, more specifically: two students of Fine Art. Simone Meier is from Basel/Switzerland, Jennifer Ross from Liverpool/UK. At present, both are exchange students at Willem de Kooning Academy (‘art media design & leisure’) in Rotterdam/NL. There they met, in September 2008. Only then they discovered each other’s individual artistic interests and only then they found out that they shared some of them. That led to the desire to do a joint project – and then they approached Het Plafond.

Simone Meier: “In the beginning of my art study I was interested in the subject ‘room’: the room as an external or interior space, as a ‘space between’. I made various installations to explore this issue, using different materials and objects. I was interested in how the architectural room as a passable space influences the specific abilities of the work and the movement of the viewer.
In later works, social aspects of space became more important. Urban space has different ‘rooms’ and different social structures. In daily life, the individual and its own social convention is confronted with social standards and rules. This contrast creates conflicts in which I am interested.”

Jennifer Ross: ”With my work I explore and examine social issues. Working with new media, creating films, Internet sites and publications, I aim to take issues and present them in a new way, a way that gives the public a chance to re-examine the issue. I think art can provide a space for people to step back and re-look at issues to analyze them in a way that mainstream media cannot.
Artists which inspire me (Phil Collins, Renzo Martens and Jeremy Deller) all tackle social issues, in different ways. I feel they are very successful at making their audience re-questioning what they thought was once correct.
Currently I am looking into the effects of media on the public. I have created my own media website ‘Who’s News’. It contains news items collected from the general public. By creating this alternative news I hope to respond to what people actually feel, as what is reported on mainstream media is often an outside view. ‘Who’s News’ gives people a chance to have their say.”

It is obvious that the two artists share an interest in the social position of the individual, and in the impositions put on them that vary according to the situations they’re in: private or more public. When pointed at Het Plafond by a fellow student (thanks, Sae!), Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross decided to propose a collaboration project there to explore both their mutual interests and Het Plafond’s specific location in between ‘public’ and ‘private’.
Their initial concept for Het Plafond has been constantly evolving over the past two months. Having worked individually so far, the two artists themselves have been evolving into a true creative team. Mutually complementing and stimulating each other, open to outward suggestions and willing to research all conceptual as well as visual and spatial implications in Het Plafond’s given characteristics, they display a true professional attitude. Their project here might be considered a ‘work in process’, with the installation constantly changing in space and in time. The ‘Private Peep Show’ that is going to be ‘opened’ on January 24 being no more, but also no less than just another phase of that process.
Soon after, both Jennifer Ross and Simone Meier will leave Rotterdam to go back home. Where PPS has been their first joint project, they have discovered the positive energy of artistic cooperation. Let’s hope they will be inspired to do more of them in the future, crossing the borders of their private rooms…

Private Life – Public Life: Peeping In
Over the centuries, many foreign visitors to The Netherlands have commented on their surprise to find the windows of many Dutch homes uncovered, even in the evenings, allowing anybody on the street a peep into what happened inside, into what they considered to be the ‘privacy of the family’. Explanations for this phenomenon range from ‘a public control over each & every aspect of private life’ “with nothing to hide” to a pre-supposed Dutch ‘self-consciousness’ – “I’m proud of what I am”. However and whatever, it may come as no surprise that the format of the TV reality show ‘Big Brother’ is of Dutch origin – it’s huge international success is far more reason for surprise… Participants of this show live in a house that is physically completely cut off from the outside world, yet is invaded by TV – not, as is normal nowadays, to provide its inhabitants peeks of the outside, but rather to provide full exposure of everything that is happening inside to an anonymous audience outside. Infested by cameras, the BBHouse grants its occupants no privacy at all – not even at their most private, most intimate moments. TV viewers worldwide love the show – it offers them full opportunity to ‘peek in’, without, of course, the chance of ‘being caught in the act’, without, of course, the risk of themselves being peeked into. Most of them are camera shy anyway… And yet, whenever there’s a new BB-series being started and potential BB’ers asked for, would be participants apply by their thousands, fully aware that each and every detail of them is going to be screened...
Grotesque as this may seem at first glance, BB is a metaphor of how the media have changed our lives over the past decades. When writing his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1948), George Orwell coined its central phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’ as the nightmare of a totalitarian society. In those days, the very idea of ‘being peeked into’ was considered an offense to human dignity, as was the idea of ‘exposing yourself’ and the idea of ‘peeking in’ yourself (‘voyeurism’). Morally and ethically abject these notions may have been considered at the time, at the same time they were the ‘stuff that films and novels are made of’. Alfred Hitchcock exploited them in his successful film ‘Rear Window’ (1954) and Michelangelo Antonioni in ‘Blow Up’ (1966) – both films on photographers furtively peeking into their victims’ lives. A similar motif, yet taken one step further, is present in Paul Auster’s great story ‘Ghosts’ (1986) – it’s about Blue, a private eye [sic!] investigating mister Black for a client called White. Black and White turn out to be the same person: a writer, working on a story about Blue watching him. Who’s watching who? That was then. In 2009, typing ‘window peeping’ into Google produces as very first hit a YouTube page loaded with videos – most of them ‘home made’, and many of them even made by the ‘victims’ themselves: stuff that Hitchcock’s, Antonioni’s and Auster’s used to be made of… Not to mention contemporary chat-sites, triggering both your eyes and your ears…
So there is more to it. Not only have ‘peeking in’ cq ‘voyeurism’ and ‘being peeked at’ cq ‘exposing or yourself’ or even ‘displaying yourself’ and downright ‘exhibitionism’ become everyday stuff. YouTube is proof of the fact that these are now devices in the hands of the masses, of people themselves, truly ‘bottom up’ – quite different from the times when ‘top down’ was the only direction available. Instead of being merely ‘the audience’ for ‘Producers’, the audience itself has now become producers and actors and publishers themselves. This is contemporary reality.
That brings us back to Big Brother – it was hailed as a true ‘reality show’ – and thus to the eternal question of ‘what is reality’? Instead of professionally directed professional actors, trained to act ‘better and bigger’ than Life, BB features ‘ordinary people’. While in their glamorized BBHouse they try to act – like most of us – according to the idealised stereotypes of the media – the ‘public’  image – and while they try to keep up that pose as long as possible, TV audiences worldwide can’t wait for them to ‘break up’ so that ‘the real thing’ may come out: the arguments & fights, the shit & the sex; and even those can’t escape from glamorized models of behaviour…  The distinction between ‘private’ and public’ seems to have evaporated, and that between ‘real’ and ‘glamorized’ as well.

Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross: Private Peep Show at Het Plafond
“Why are people so eager to display themselves to the world?” / “Why are people so eager to peek in?” / “We don’t understand it… we never watch those reality shows… I don’t like being filmed.” Thus Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross when presenting the first sketches of their project for Het Plafond on December 18, 2008. Simone Meier: “I don’t even have any private pics” / “I don’t need to watch myself on photos” / “I hate it when people use their camera’s”. Jennifer Ross, on the other hand: “I do like my pictures” / “I’m always taking pictures as a tourist; wherever there is a monument, I stand in front of it.” Initially planning to work with found footage from other people’s lives – the glamorized and the ‘real’ version of it – both artists took up the challenge to put themselves into the limelight: displaying their own ‘selves’. Their own ‘Private Peep Show’.
‘Private Peep Show’ starts right outside. Referring to commercial postings that are normal in public space (ads, billboards, etcetera), Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross have posted glamorized images of themselves on the outer side of Het Plafond’s shop window. Passers-by are invited to take them off and/or to add their own glamour pics: would you dare to? Thus the installation aims to be ‘bottom up’ and interactive. These pictures also shield off the window, leaving only small peepholes into Het Plafond’s interior space. There the artists present themselves once more – this time their private lives. Would you like to peep in? Dare to peep in?
If you do, you may admire the installation that Simone Meier & Jennifer Ross have built there. A stage there is a platform for a more domestic, private sphere. A number of monitors in various sizes present imagery (both stills and videos) of the artists’ private lives. In true YouTube or webcam style, some of this imagery ostensibly being posed, some seemingly more haphazard. Is this their ‘real’ lives – as opposed to their glamorized pictures on the window?
While visitors are peeping in from the sidewalk, they themselves are being observed by a webcam. Have you noticed? These images are being displayed real time on a monitor visible through Het Plafond’s side window. To be sure: these images will NOT be stored in any way! In addition to this digital surveillance, peepers in may also run the chance of being observed by real eyes: directly behind Het Plafond’s presentation space, and a bit elevated above it and thus not plainly visible from the street, is our working desk; while sitting there – which we don’t do all the time – we have perfect view of anything that happens in Het Plafond and on the sidewalk outside. We may watch you while peeping in, and even observe your reactions once you notice us – watching you. On the other hand – we may not notice you at all. That gives you the chance to watch us – unaware of you peeping in on the (semi-)private part of our lives…; the really private part of them stays hidden from view on the first floor of the apartment that Het Plafond is the first part of.

‘Private Peep Show’ – it’s all about displaying your ‘self’, about ‘posing’, about ‘peeping in’ and about ‘being peeped at’: who’s watching who?

© Guus Vreeburg/Het Plafond, Rotterdam/NL; 090119

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Private Peep Show

Information
Willem Besselink:     +31 6 19 4343 41
Guus Vreeburg:        +31 6 4720  4750