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Ernest Anna Bessems

1996
Based in Amsterdam

With the ancient, raw-bodied weight of emotion. With the tension between control and collapse. With the paradox of being human in a time that wants to outgrow humanity.

 

My practice moves between sculpture, installation, drawing , paintings, and performance with the body as its gravitational center, both as subject and as instrument. The body is where I return to when thought fractures me. It’s the only place that doesn’t seem to bend the truth. Instinct trembles through the body before thought tries to make sense of it.

Material, for me, is never neutral. It holds memory, friction, Decay, and softness. It tells stories before I do. I’m drawn to what resists: sand, jute, bronze, reed, burnt wood, animal textures. I manipulate, break, burn, and bind. These are not gestures of destruction, but of revealing. My newer materials, lightweight, flexible, growing serve as a basis. They offer the potential to reshape endlessly, to evolve and dissolve. I let them move, grow, and breathe. I direct, then let go. The work emerges in that negotiation between instinct and intellect, precision and accident. Rawness and imperfection don’t need solving. They ask to be seen, not explained.

Emotion in my work isn’t performed. It erupts, like instinct before language. It is the same grief, desire, shame, and rage that moved us thousands of years ago. In that sense, What I make begins personally but lands in something more collective. We all carry fear, just shaped by different words and wounds. Mythology plays a role not to romanticize, but to reveal how little has changed. We are still telling the same stories, just with different tools.

 

We are evolving quickly technologically, intellectually but our emotions remain slow, raw, and unresolved. And yet, instead of honoring them, we pathologize them. We rush toward post-human and post-emotional futures as if feeling is a burden to shed. But what is left when we remove feeling? What kind of life remains?

 

My process begins with confrontation. Some emotional impact in the world or within myself. I sketch, I reflect, I start building. As the work takes shape, it challenges me back. I follow that exchange. My studio is full of fragments: wounds in bronze, bleeding sand, ropes that bind broken skins. I sculpt not to illustrate, but to distill: to embody something that’s felt, but hard to hold.

 

I create in a world fragmented by identity, performance, and hyper-individualism. A world addicted to productivity and optimization, yet yearning for rest and meaning. My work does not offer answers. It offers a place to feel. To remember the raw self. To confront discomfort without fixing it. To make peace with the unfinished.

My background in spatial design and architecture shapes the way I think through material and space. I don’t only sculpt form, I sculpt environment, tension, proximity. I’m always aware of how a body enters, lingers, or withdraws. This sensitivity to structure and transition informs how I build not just objects, but experiences. Whether a work is held in the hand or towers in a room, it’s always in dialogue with the body moving through or around it.

I’m influenced by artists who understand the body as a site of both violence and transcendence. Rebecca Horn, with her poetic prosthetics and performative machines, showed me how the body can be extended, transformed, alienated. Anselm Kiefer taught me how to work with ruin as a language and how to speak through heaviness, trauma, and material memory. Joep van Lieshout inspired me through his fearless engagement with systems bodily, social, and architectural building entire worlds that feel both absurd and painfully real. Like them, I seek to build a visual language that’s visceral, direct, and mythic.

 

Sometimes I wonder if my work is part of the problem, feeding into the same self-involved, emotionally saturated culture I critique. But then I remember that honesty, when shared without demand, becomes connection. If my work allows someone to recognize a feeling, or even just to feel something in a world that numbs then that is enough.

 

I make art to rupture and to repair. To question and to stand firm before what I’ll never understand. I try to give emotion enough silence so it can speak without shouting

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