Bas Princen
(1975)
Netherlands
  

 

 

 The Dutch architect / photographer Bas Princen graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven in 1998. He joined the Berlage Institute in 1999. His photos show snippets of landscape, not as an illustration of reality but rather as images of a potential reality of this landscape. He often photographs places that we do not know about, too abandoned to be nature, places whose initial function we have long forgotten about, even if they have retained traces of it. What interests him and what he photographs is the appropriation of such places, and traces of activities reveal them in their true nature, and restore a new reality to them. These are mutations of landscape which, through new and often fleeting uses take on a different meaning. Bas Princen exhibited his work in particular in 2001 at ArchiLab, in March 2003 as part of the monographic show at the NAi in Rotterdam, and in November 2003 as part of the exhibition UFO Belgrade Urban Fog of Belgrade, in Berlin. His photos have illustrated many publications including Definite Infinite about the work of the Austrian architects Riegler and Riewe and the 2001 catalog of Mutations. Bas Princen is involved with the research project “Shrinking Cities International Research” organized by Philipp Oswalt as the photographer in the investigative team at the Ivanovo site in Russia. Bas Princen is the author of Artificial Arcadia, published in 2004. The work of Bas Princen will be shown in the 2004 Venice Biennal. He is currently involved in an Art Project, set up around the changing landscape of the new High Speed Train Line Through the Netherlands, and called Atelier HSL.