Ria Pacquée | °1954
Ria Pacquée had her international breakthrough in the 1980s with a performance series featuring the self-conceived characters Madame and It. By infiltrating reality as these two personae, she carried out an artistic investigation on the thin line between fiction and documentary. In more recent work she focuses on photographic and video productions, but her experiences as a performance artist still play an important role in the process.
As a spectator of public life in her photographs and videos and as a participant in the performances, ‘the street’ is Ria Pacquée’s area of study – the living setting where she ‘rambles’ and discreetly records events from her particular point of view. An interest in rituals, the ‘non-sense’ of religions, anonymous city wandering and the collecting of its accompanying sounds and images — a recreation and appropriation of reality by extracting details from their everyday context — are recurring themes in her work. But much is left to chance as well.