Mariken Wessels - i want to eat & queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off - 2010

Queen Ann P.S. Belly cut off is the unfolding of a melancholic narrative of a woman whose life seems to be dominated by her obesity. Wessels affords her readers a gaze that is at once intimate but never voyeuristic. Queen Ann's peculiar and touching photo collages function as self-renderings that express a longing for another 'being'; these projections of herself coalesce with the image that the book evokes around her persona. An uncomfortable incompatibility emerges between the present and the past life of Ann and the status of being beautiful, an unease that the arrangement of the photos make all too evident.

Elisabeth - I want to eat - consists of a collection of anonymous photographs, letters and postcards belonging to a young woman, which the artist stumbled upon in a shop in the Hendrik Jacobszstraat in Amsterdam. The found material was appropriated by photographing the images, creatively processing and arranging them, as well as occasionally adding other material. The photographs depict a young woman defiantly posing in front of the camera, both figuratively and literally exposing herself. The black and white photographs are worn out, frayed by numerous scratches and dust particles, blending together both the exaltation and melancholy recorded in them.