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With a fascination for cross-media practices and an affinity to narratives and stories, Suzan Noesen has shaped her practice in various forms from painting and video installations, staged photographs to, more recently, artistic fiction film. She currently holds a special interest in the relationship between mental and “real” spaces, the body and movement and the social dimension in gestures, language and visual patterns.
Noesen questions the role of art in its act of differentiating and categorizing society and morals with the use of aesthetic codes. Simultaneously, her work dwells on the more frail and tender side of human nature. Distinctive codes of behavior and appearances serve as starting points in her work to play and question ideas of intellectual hierarchy and moral superiority.
In her aesthetic approach, Suzan Noesen explores ways of creating a space for observation and perception. With her installations, she seeks to engage the viewers viscerally on a sensory, emotional and mental level, in a desire to bring them to a state of self-reflection. Despite the staged settings, her photographic works have a strong awareness of processes which hints towards the involvement of “reality” within performativity itself. There is no real outside without an inside. Both are grown together. Her canvases are like silky wear, an envelope for the mind.
Suzan Noesen’s work is akin to an experimental anthropological research with a distinct pictorial language. There is a feel of entertaining fiction. A lush multimedia universe made of sensory, visual, sound, textural and textual echoes, lures the audience into a dreamlike state, revealing, behind first appearances, something immediate and bare.
Through her works, Suzan Noesen likes to provoke communication between different social horizons, be it in her own direct social environment or in general. After her studies in arts, she gathered experience in social change projects, living in an ecovillage community and self-sufficient organized houses. Today, she lives in an intergenerational cohabitation with her grandmother.