The MEP is proud to announce a major exhibition of the photographic and video works of the internationally renowned Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. Taking over one complete floor, Dijkstra will install four of her most important video installations, all presented for the first time in a Parisian institution.

Dijkstra is celebrated both for her photographic and video works, many of which deal with questions of identity, the passage of time and intimacy. Already present in the collection of the MEP, among many major global collections with substantial photographic series often following the development of her portrait subjects over extended periods of time, Dijkstra’s work in portraiture has turned increasingly to video in recent years.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Rineke Dijkstra has established her reputation with incredible sensitivity to the ethical and creative contract put in place when an artist sets out to capture the appearance and personality of a human subject with the camera lens, whether as still or moving images. Her work poses essential questions about the ways in which people present themselves to be seen, and the ways in which this auto-representation changes over time, through age and experience, and through learned codes of socialisation.

The video works selected for the MEP exhibition deal exclusively with the ways in which younger people look, and present themselves to be seen as portrait subjects in the process of establishing their identities, whether as school students, performers and/or consumers of visual culture. In many ways, through holding up the camera to face her subjects, Dijkstra challenges us all to re-think the ways in which we look and attach meaning to images of others and thereby how we understand our own roles in contemporary society.

More information on the event can be found here.