BIOGRAPHY
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Saskia Olde Wolbers (Dutch) lives and works in London. Since the mid-1990s, she has been working with video and has shown extensively in UK and international museums, galleries and public spaces.
Olde Wolbers’s short narrative videos combine carefully crafted fictional scripts with visuals that reveal other-worldly environments. Off-screen narrators address the fluidity of fact through biographies relating to notions of translation, neurosis and verisimilitude with an eye for wit and the absurd.
Referencing computer-generated imagery, her liquid visuals are entirely analogue, shot in real-time in model sets. Skeletal objects, architecture and living forms are given a “skin” when dipped in paint and submerged underwater. Materials are animated through this unpredictable confrontation of oil and water and become dripping, oozing and undulating matter oscillating between representation and abstraction. These recordings of sculptural and chemical lo-fi processes subvert the truth-telling qualities of filming reality.
Her videos incorporate soundtracks composed by Daniel Pemberton, who is well known for creating an inventive hybrid of musical media – from electronic to orchestral – throughout his work in film and television. In the process of editing the music, scripts and visuals together, and by presenting the finished works on a loop, Olde Wolbers creates a circular time structure that utilises an unfamiliar and new cinematic space.
Saskia Olde Wolbers is represented by Maureen Paley, London, and Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam, and is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.