Nyré Tiessen is an audiovisual artist living and working in Utrecht (NL) and Berlin (DE). Her practice investigates the boundary between the self and the other: how that boundary becomes tangible in the body, in space, in the traces people leave behind. Working with photography and video, she is concerned with what takes place on both sides of the image: the contact that forms between herself and her subject, and what that exchange does to each of them.
Her work is driven by a fundamental preoccupation with the discontinuity of our existence: the desire to reach the other, knowing that proximity will never resolve the boundary between two beings. Each project is an attempt to find out what the quest for continuity can look like, through different bodies, different distances, different forms of contact and loss. The friction and discomfort of that attempt are as much a part of the work as the moments of coalescence — sometimes what the work captures is precisely the failure to get near.
Intimacy and eroticism run as constants through her practice, not as subjects but as methods: ways of stretching the boundary between observer and observed, of exploring what happens at its limits and what becomes visible at the moment it resists. She works without excessive staging, improvises with what presents itself, and looks for the poetic potential of coincidence and triviality.
Central to her practice is an acute awareness of the power dynamic inherent in the act of documentation, and a commitment to reducing it as much as possible: approaching her subjects with humility, listening before she looks. Her work never feels entirely her own. She is always a collaborator, and what she makes emerges in the space between herself and the subject she works with.
education
2017 — 2021 | BSc with Honours | HKU University of the Arts Utrecht
2014 — 2020 | BSc of Psychology cum laude | University of Utrecht