Be Like Water

Be Like Water – A monumental first monograph: an exhaustive overview, over a period of more than twenty years (2002-23) and 500 pages, of Anouk Kruithof’s transdisciplinary approach, combining photography, sculpture, installation, collage, video, text and collaborative social projects.

For this book, Anouk Kruithof and Fransesco Zanot developed a body of research based on water, seen as a metaphor for the circulation of information, through which the artist questions the status of the contemporary image. Well-known for her artist’s books (notably Happy Birthday to You, self-published in 2011, praised by Martin Parr, and A Head with Wings, Little Brown Mushroom, 2011, praised by critic Jörg Colberg), Anouk Kruithof’s Be Like Water Be Like Water is both a textual and visual work, conceived as a retrospective, which reflects the fluidity of her practice. By combining and mixing works in an anti-chronological and anti-thematic way, Kruithof presents a complex, multiple and playful narrative, which also leaves room for critical reinterpretation.
Anouk Kruithof (b. 1981, Dordrecht) is a Dutch artist of international renown. She lived in Berlin, New York and Mexico City from 2008 to 2018. 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 practice lies at the crossroads of photography, sculpture, installation, photomontage, artists’ books, text, performance, video and public interventions. Her work is an investigation into the representation of current societal themes on the Internet. She has collected images dealing with issues such as privacy, government surveillance, pollution and climate change. She subjects them to critical scrutiny by extracting them from the digital sphere, and translating these photo-graphics into her own idiosyncratic, three-dimensional visual language. She is interested in how our psychological condition is altered by the unstable times we live in (systematic control, stress and chaos), in a world dominated by technology.