Graduation Show Piet Zwart Institute

Tent., Rotterdam



After rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (1929) she kept on pestering for
500 English Pounds a year and a room with a lock. I gave her my mum’s old Shimmy Shuttle
for her birthday. The 500 English Pounds were of course impossible to find.


With a series of drawings titled "A Room with A Lesbian View" Suzanne van Rossenberg (Netherlands) intertwines a story about art with a story about identity and gender, pointing to the ways in which both involve predominant preconceptions and values —cultural constructions that may appear as natural only because we inhabit and reproduce them without question."A Room with A Lesbian View" is a series of drawings and watercolours of a church in Leiden, which engages in a subtle play with artistic value judgements. The artist, as much as the viewer, uses certain criteria to decide what a good or a bad drawing is. But here, the repeated action of drawing the same scene again and again stirs the criteria, lightly but visibly, making the veiwer feel uncomfortable about their judgement. The phrase "A Room with A Lesbian View", written onto the drawings, gives a second dimension to this discomfort by bringing in a gender-specific narrator, inviting us to question whether there is such a thing as a neutral narrator or viewer.