de Rijke / de Rooij. Mandarin Ducks. Biennale Venedig 2005

"Since commencing their collaboration in 1994, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij's select corpus of film and slide installations, photoworks, objects and printed matter has opened up an arena in which images are characterized by a curious kind of detachment. De Rijke/De Rooij's images are polyvalent, sometimes appropriated but disengaged from their prevailing aesthetic, social, economic and political definitions. For De Rijke/De Rooij, art is a locus from which to reflect upon the artistic image itself and to engage in a dialogue with many other arenas where images are produced and acquire meaning, ranging from the reserved approach to imagery in some Islamic cultures to the West's obsessions with the visual and the resulting image overload generated by its media industry." (Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen)

Biennale di Venezia, Holländischer Pavillon, 2005; mit Textbeiträgen von Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, Tom Holert und Dario Gamboni.