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Artist Lotte Geeven (1980)  

Title Sovereign  

Year 2012  

Material Video   

About the work 

What happened here? A tragic accident in which the black car landed upside down, spinning like a top before coming to a halt? If you look closely, you’ll see that the car isn’t completely stationary. Very slowly, the powerful Jaguar turns on its own axis in a kind of slow-motion pirouette, but in an environment that’s in no way reminiscent of a ballet room. The abandoned car park provides a sad backdrop, as if the car were a lonely beetle lying on its back, unable to get up. Geeven made this film over a three-month period at the end of a group exhibition, during which the rotating car was on the roof of a former multi-storey car park in the Bijlmer. For this video piece, she filmed the car for 24 hours.    

About the artist

Lotte Geeven makes photographs, drawings, objects and installations that tell a story without immediately giving away the plot – like a rewound memory or clouds drifting away in the distance. At first glance, everything seems to make sense, but a closer look reveals that nothing is as it seems. Geeven studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. As artist-in-residence, she has worked in Xiamen in China, Cemeti in Indonesia, New York and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2010, Geeven was awarded the Illy Prize for young talent.

In the collection 

Acquired in 2012. De Nederlandsche Bank has four photo and video works by Geeven in its art collection. Like George Hendrik Breitner a hundred years earlier, Geeven often uses the city as a backdrop for her photographs, installations and videos. But unlike Breitner, Geeven is not interested in making the city feel as real as possible. Her work raises the question of where reality ends and fantasy begins.  

Extraordinary works, extraordinary stories

Education

Learn all about the economy

Vrouw staat voor informatief spel in tentoonstellingsruimte.

Money collection

Learn about money from the past and present 

Munt onder de loep.

Art collection

View the artworks

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