Inkijk # 16: Laurien, March 1996 / Laurien, September 2001

A lot of Manon de Boer’s work pertains to the concept of personal identity. In her video and filmic portraits, she often contrasts the act of looking at somebody - including their body language and facial expression - with the story that they recount about themselves. The work that she made for the Inkijk is a diptych of video portraits that concentrate on a woman’s face. The videos were made within a five year interval of each other.

Lately Manon de Boer has been working on ‘Panoramic Portraits’, an internet art project. This project represented the first in a series of assignments in which SKOR approached artists to study this virtual public domain. In ‘Panoramic Portraits’ De Boer sketches out a number of virtual portraits of people based on different types of information (www.skor.nl/PanoramicPortraits). The project started out with a group of people from the artist’s personal life and then, during the course of the assignment, expanded to include strangers.