Marie Ilse Bourlanges (1983, Paris) is an artist based in Amsterdam, whose practice combines tangible, performative and written matter, within collaborative and individual trajectories. With a particular attention to transience and materiality, Bourlanges explores the borders between the personal and the public, and how intimacy can resonate collectively. Through an eco-feminist lens, her work aims at reconsidering and shifting power dynamics, between humans and across species.
Collecting and foraging is often Bourlanges’ starting point to extract narrative, conceptual and performative potential of matter; she looks into embedded textual quality of textile (Stranded, Sans Réponse), resilience of earth (Wetter than Wet) and erotic charge of clay (Farewell to my lover). She dedicated her artistic research fellowship at the Rietveld Academie (Pollinating Agents – Resilient Beings) learning from other- and inter-species forms of collaboration, relating it to her own struggle in motherhood. Her recent project Mother’s Milk is an extensive research into intergenerational trauma and embodied memory. Working in close-relationship with a mental health-care institution and archives of marginalized individuals, the investigation expanded into Bourlanges writing her first archival fiction, a multilayered artist’s book published by Jap Sam Books.
From 2009 to 2019 Marie Ilse Bourlanges worked in a duo practice with Elena Khurtova, in which both artists explored the paradox between transformation and its inherent loss in formats that varied from large-scale transient installations (Dust to *dust), transformative sculptures (Wetter than Wet), performances (Shelf Life) and artists books (Looking for the Ursa Major).
Marie Ilse Bourlanges graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was artist in residence at Atelier Holsboer in Paris, 3bisF Contemporary Art Centre (FR) and the European Ceramic Work Centre (NL). She was awarded the Proven Talent Grant from Mondriaan Fund, the artistic research fellowship of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and have exhibited internationally with institutions such as 3bisF Contemporary Art Centre (FR) with Manifesta biennial #13, Arti & Amicitiae (NL), Looiersgracht 60 (NL), Hotel Maria Kapel (NL), Forma Art gallery (CH), Kunsthalle Lottozero, (IT) and Korean Ceramic Biennale. Her artistic essays have been published, among others with Robida magazine, Simulacrum magazine, P///AKT pool, Journal of Interior Architecture Research (EE) and Parking Lot. Since 2012 she has been teaching at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague and until 2019 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL).
– contact +31 6 31950909 info@marieilsebourlanges.com