Aukje Dekker

Aukje Dekker
TELL ME, 2021
Single Channel Video
Duration varies per secret

TELL ME

‘A work in which confidences fall on deaf ears’

This recent work by Aukje Dekker is a video installation, shot from a series of silent and secret conversations held in The Hague in 2021. The participants were given the opportunity to free some emotions without words. They shared their secrets with Dekker in a one-on-one setting without giving sound to it. Shared, but not outspoken, the artist ‘heard’ them by reading their lips. Dekker is born hearing impaired and a trained lip-reader.

The series touches upon different elements, from the iconography of language to the concept of privacy, the exploration of symbols and the power of interpretation. By confiding into the artist silently, the beholder sets in motion a chain of liberation: not totally given, not totally taken, it’s literally hanging in the air.

On the opening night Dekker will be once again the priestess you can silently pour you heart out to.

Aukje Dekker (1983, Rotterdam) is a visual and conceptual artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. Dekker graduated with honours from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2006. After this Dekker completed two Masters of Fine Art at Sandberg Institute Amsterdam and Central St Martins London. Dekker’s work has been exhibited in various national and international galleries, museums and fairs including Ultra Super New Gallery, Tokyo, JP (2015), Museum Boymans van Beuningen, NL (2012), IMT Gallery, London, UK (2011), Tel Aviv Museum of Art IS (2018), Unseen Amsterdam, FIAC Paris and Loop Barcelona. Name it; she has been there. Alongside her projects as an independent artist, Aukje Dekker is the co-founder and director of SEXYLAND; a conceptual nightclub and SEXYLAND World; a conceptual world.

-Text by Sara van Bussel