Ellen Schippers

Live Performance & Video Performance

Ellen Schippers’ dramatic and compelling work relates to gender, stereotypical male/female images, ideals of beauty and the contradiction between image versus authenticity. Schippers strips images: by inflating and deconstructing them, she is revealing the emotions that are hidden behind these selfmade images. Schippers is a multi-disciplinary artist and makes use of theatrical resources and creates a fantasy world that is continually bursting at the seams.

She has presented her work live on location in galleries, in theatres, at cultural institutions and festivals like: The Melkweg, Maison Descartes (Franch Cultural Embassy) and the Vondelpark Open Air Theatre in Amsterdam, the Hippodrome Theatre in Londen, the World Science Fiction Congress and the Wiener Sommer Symposion in Vienna.

In 2008 she created the exhibition Image & I-magic: a multi dimensional video experience. Every inch of the exhibition was filled with mysterieus images, sound, music and poetry. Image & I-magic is about the tension field between physical appearance (Image) and inner experience (I-magic). The exhibition was opened by Ellen ten Damme and by Bianca du Mortier, curator of the Rijksmuseum.

Bianca du Mortier: “Ellen Schippers does not fear to play with taboos and fantasies, either. This play with feelings and physical appearance is what makes her work so powerful”

In 2009 she participated in a project about Video Art of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

At the moment she is working on a new exhibition at Loods 6 in April 2010 and she is preparing lectures for the University of Amsterdam.

Background

Ellen Schippers was educated in textile art in Amsterdam, in performance-art, textile art and object-project at the Vrije Academie of The Hague and video at Open Studio in Amsterdam.