"Dijkmans practice development over the last ten years, can be defined as Decoding the Coloniser’s Mind. The decoding of the coloniser’s mindset requires identifying the evolution of the Enlightenment into contemporary practices, despite the prevailing opinion among many scholars that the fall of the Nazi regime ended the Enlightenment project and the colonial reflex." from Decoding the Coloniser’s Mind by Galit Eilat (2020)

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Artist Statement

I am a research-based and multi-disciplinary artist using film, photography, sculpture, and installation. My practice focuses on the points where culture intersects with other fields of inquiry. The works themselves are speculative, partly based on facts and research but often brought into the realm of the imagination. I work on multiyear process-based research projects that resulting in various works, discursive events, exhibitions, and publications embodying different parts of a larger story.

My work is concerned with residues of enlightenment ideology, manifestations of collective memory, and blind spots of representation. My working method interweaves and investigates collective narratives concerning the commons, broadly construed. My practice explores ideas underpinning the categorical fields of scientific research and museology and analyses the mainstream propagation of images, cultural norms, and the exploitation of natural resources.

I have an intuitive and artistic approach and aim to reveal hidden stories and relations that might be overlooked. I involve audiences in direct experiences that can enhance emphatic relationships with their surroundings. The production process is often an experimental and innovative creation process involving other scientists, technicians, and artisans. For the past two decades, I have realised projects on various types of knowledge production, including social history museums, scientific fields (e.g. astronomy, macro-biology, electricity), and forms of the collective imagination.

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Enough Room for Space

In 2005 I founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS) together with Maarten Vanden Eynde. Enough Room for Space is an interdependent art organisation that initiates experimental research projects and exhibitions. ERforS tends to act as freely as possible, always placing the context and the idea before the medium, challenging the barriers between different disciplines (artistic, scientific or activist).

Dialogue is central to the way ERforS initiates and develops projects. Our aim is to closely relate both to the practices and interests of the artists involved as well as the different contexts where we exhibit or produce new works. We take time to develop ideas parallel to each other, to experiment and exchange ideas relating to common fields of interest and explore adjacent fields of knowledge. For this reason we mostly work on long-term projects, that take shape and find direction by the various input and energy of the different partners and participants.

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Marjolijn Dijkman (1978, NL) lives and works in Brussels (BE) & Saint-Mihiel (FR), graduated from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2001, the MFA Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2003 and was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2006 - 2007.

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Supported by Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam, NL 

Image above: Marjolijn Dijkman, 2009