First monograph, bringing together for the first time a large selection of artworks made by Anouk Kruithof over twenty years (2002–23).
Exploring and re-imaging photography and sculpture, Kruithof has placed the interaction, collaboration and relationship between people and their (natural and/or technological) surroundings at the core of her practice to create liberating and disturbing artworks. Be Like Water is both textual and visual, enriched with the purpose of focusing in on her work and the fluidity of her practice. This volume is a retro-perspective; by combining and mixing works in an anti-chronological and anti-thematic way, Kruithof presents a newly evolved narrative that interweaves complexity and multiplicity with fun and play, and at the same time leaves room for a critical reinterpretation.
Anouk Kruithof (born 1981 in Dordrecht) is an internationally renowned Dutch artist, who settled in Mexico City after living in New York from 2011 to 2015. Today, she lives and works between Belgium (Brussels), The Netherlands, and her wooden house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in Botopasi (Surinam).
Anouk Kruithof's multilayered, interdisciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, photo-montage, artist-books, text, performance, video and interventions in the public domain. Kruithof's work is an investigation into the online representation of urgent societal themes. She collected circulating images related to issues like privacy, government surveillance, pollution and climate change. Kruithof subjects these to critical scrutiny by extracting existing imagery from the digital sphere, and translating the photographs into her own idiosyncratic three-dimensional visual idiom. She is interested in how the human psychological condition is shifting in unstable times of systematic control, stress and chaos in the technologically mediated world.
