Media Art Grant of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia awarded in cooperation with Düsseldorf, state capital of NRW, and medienwerk.nrw

Media artist Maria Blondeel has been designated official guest of North-Rhine Westphalia in the scope of the state grant awarded in cooperation with the City of Düsseldorf and medienwerk.nrw. Blondeel intends to reside in Düsseldorf from March to mid-May in order to work on her sound-and-video project “A40 Ruhr”. Candidates for the 2010 award were selected with the assistance of Instituut voor beeldende, audiovisuele en mediakunst (BAM),Ghent. http://www.bamart.be
 

"A40 RUHR":
In her recent work, Maria Blondeel tags the volatile nowadays presence as utopian landmarks. With a virtual move(ment) to be someone somewhere, a mobile determination, the composition deconstructs the present versus the absent displacements of a nomadic generation and versus the location of the motorways in the Ruhr area. In these projections and sounds, we can dis-cover an event of ‘fleeting’ identities and (dis)-places over the immateriality of theoretical time and abstract space. 
 
Maria Blondeel’s artistic practice can be situated in the field of sound art. Her work can be characterized as an inter-disciplinary, experimental approach to technology, image, light and sound. Her concepts are intrinsically connected with the time-course, the lapse of time as visualized through sunlight. She has experimented with the sonification of light in both urban and rural environments to obtain an insight into this complex visual process.
Maria Blondeel has made sonic light installations and site-specific works for vehicles, telephone and radio. She has participated in concerts and performances in collaboration with musicians. She has produced a series of compositions for audio CD and video DVD and created an extensive photographic oeuvre based on the blueprint technique. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and festivals in Europe, the United States and Asia.