...the work of Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink is the result of a well thought-out plan...
The work of Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink is the result of a well thought-out plan. Accordingly, her photo series of the centers of economic power, usually symbolized by the conference tables of the Boards of Directors of large multinationals, goes way beyond the inherently incidental nature of photography. Jacqueline Hassink is well known within the photography arena for having created bodies of work, brilliantly designed as books and exhibition prints that centre on the theme of economic power. The Table of Power (1993-1995), Banks (1995-1996), Female Power Stations: Queen Bees (1996-2000) and Mindscapes (1998-2003) are all visual, graphic and sociological mappings of the axes of global economic structures. Hassink is a visiting Professor at Harvard University in Conceptual Photography and a winner of the prestigious Rencontres Arles Unlimited Award. Her work has been show extensively in Europe, the USA and Japan. Jacqueline Hassink Hassink was the winner of the prestigious Prix No Limit d’Arles at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France (2002), given to a photographer who pushes the boundaries of the medium. Born in the Netherlands, Hassink (1966) is most known for her global photo art projects that deal with the world of economic power. In a precise and almost scientific way she has mapped the economic globalization of our society by focusing on global FORTUNE 500 companies since 1993. She has collaborated with the most powerful CEOs in the world on projects that take place primarily in their headquarters. In her first art project The Table of Power (1993-1995) she photographed the boardroom tables of Europe’s forty largest multinational corporations. The tables were photographed without people in the frame. The collaborating multinationals were asked to fill out a questionnaire about these tables and the artist made drawings of the table setting during board meetings. Subsequently, Hassink worked on the global art projects Female Power Stations: Queen Bees (1996-2000), Mindscapes (1998-2003), Car Girls (2001-2007) and Arab Domains (2005-2006). All these projects are or will be published in book format. Her work has shown internationally including Huis Marseille, Foundation for Photo-graphy, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; Scalo gallery, New York; Galerie Deux, Tokyo; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum for Photgraphy in Tokyo; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Rencontres Arles, Arles; and the Photographers’ Gallery in London. Her photographs are in the collections of the Pont Foundation in Tilburg, Netherlands; LaSalle Bank Photography Collection in Chicago; DG Bank in Frankfurt am Main; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In 2003 she has collaborated with Rem Koolhaas on the WIRED magazine “Office Space” and in the same year she had interviews on CNN television and BBC Radio. Hassink is a visiting lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, USA, a visiting professor at the Program of Higher Education in photography at the Ecole d’arts appliqué in Vevey, Switzerland, and at the Wits University in Johannesburg, and at the Kanazawa College postgraduate program in fine arts in Kanazawa, Japan, and the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2007 Chris Boot will publish “The Power Book,” an overview of all Hassink’s work since 1993. The exhibition “The Power Show” will accompany the book. The show will tour to the following venues; Huis Marseille foundation for photography, Amsterdam; Netherlands Photo Museum, Rotterdam; Cohen Amador gallery, New York.
Dutch Eyes Nieuwe geschiedenis van de Fotografie in Nederland Dutch Standards in the Photobook a History Parr Badger Dutch Eyes, the Standards on Dutch Photography Thijsen's selection Bedrijfsfotoboek |
Jacqueline Hassink: The Table of Power Dutch artist Jacqueline Hassink explores the upper echelons of corporate culture. Her photographs of the boardroom tables of multinational companies bring us into the heart of those spaces where nameless and faceless individuals make decisions that affect us all. Using the 'Fortune 500' list, Hassink approached Europe's top forty companies. Only 21 allowed a photograph to be taken of their boardroom. Those that denied access are included as black photographs, prompting us to pose the question: what have they got to hide? Accompanied by the artist's notes made during the process of negotiation, the exhibition combines the rigour of investigative photojournalism with the conceptual flair of fine art practice. The formal clarity of the work lets the viewer's own experience of 'tables of power' -- the family dining table, the teacher's desk Born in Amsterdam, Hassink is what one might call a global professor, teaching concurrently in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the States, marketing herself as lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies. She began her artistic training in sculpture, but as she matured, developed a fascination for the power of furniture as a social and economic signifier. A consideration of corporate tables was her first project which began an initiative that maps economic globalisation with precision, and from an unusual perspective. Table of Power (1993-5) was a passport-format book which documented the empty boardrooms of the 40 largest listed Fortune 500 companies in Europe. The work comprises not only an impeccable photograph of the said table, but details about the company, such as its listed turnover, the industry in which it functions and so on. Thus the work became not only an art gesture, but one which elucidated the dynamics which inform a taxonomy of economics, identity and even hospitality. The table proved too sensitive a part of some organisations for Hassink's purposes, and these organisations refused her access. In these cases, she represented the organisations in question with a black page, which serves like a hole in the work, interrupting its surface. In 1997, the idea took wings in terms of its corporate and marketing possibilities, and she was commissioned by the magazine Fortune 500 to realise a similar project for top American companies. Since forging these inroads into the traditional and historical gap between the machinations of artmaking and those of the global economy, Hassink has been involved in significant collaborations with CEOs of major corporations. Table of Power prompted Queen Bees, a project which looks at more than just the corporate table, but stays within the realm of powerful decision-making. Here Hassink's research is framed by gender. She contacted women who chair large corporate boards and proceeded to photograph their boardroom tables at work, as well as their dining tables at home, juxtaposing these two sites of power. This level of portraiture, while revealing in terms of taste-based decisions and reflected cultural values, was upheld with enthusiasm by the powerful women in question, who would most likely have viewed a traditional portrait with some distaste, if not distrust. Producing large - 3x1.3m - format prints, Hassink developed this project globally. This project in turn led to another entitled Mindscapes in which Hassink interrogated the divisions between public and private space, using relatively small but extremely telling examples of personal identity in the corporate world. Personal coffee mugs, computer desktop designs and even one woman's collection of shoes became viable issues to work around in this manner. Hassink has further extended her repertoire to include the globally and socially critical and revealing elements of quarry walls around the world. These explore graffiti or spontaneous drawing, evocative in the type of scale with which Hassink works. She considers 'car girls' in another project - the women provocatively used by the car industry to motivate the appeal of cars to a presumably male buyership. Enormously visually seductive, Hassink's body of work confronts issues of control and play of public/private values that infuse identity across the board. Hassink is acknowledged by Harvard University as having contributed meaningfully to 'the shift from the traditional notion of art work to the idea of art project. The art project could be understood as a concept structured in a constellation of different but independent elements, in which the author is able to master not only the implicit creative aspects, but also a certain social dimension.'
Jacqueline Hassink Bibliography 1995 1996 |
