me :-)
Renée Turner
I’m an American artist and writer living in the Netherlands. Next to my individual work, I have also collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name, De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. Our work has employed a variety of strategies to explore female identity, critical resistance, representation and narrative archiving.
Throughout my practice with De Geuzen, writing has been as important as the visual. Working online, I became fascinated by the potential of digital writing. Playing with chatbots and hyptertext, I became more and more intrigued by this relatively new genre and the multiple expressions it takes in a variety of media and online environments.
In 2006 I received a scholarship from The Institute of Creative Technology to pursue a Masters in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University. For my dissertation, I am working on a narrative browsing piece entitled, She. The work weaves together news stories about different women. Through the use of html frames, a fictional meta-narrative parasites on to live web-pages from CNN, the BBC and other online news sources. Visually capturing articles about women such as Lady Diana, Britney Spears, and Hillary Clinton, the work explores a broad spectrum of female archetypes by juxtaposing fact and fiction.
Next to these activities I have taught Fine Art at both the BA and MA level at the Willem de Kooning Academy and the Piet Zwart Institute. For the current academic year, I am an Associate Professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Bergen, Norway).
I am also the partner of Cesare Davolio, an Italian illustrator and animator. He kindly drew the image at the top of this page. Together we have a wonderful little boy named Eliot who keeps us happily on our toes and makes us see the world in new and magical ways. We live in the city of Rotterdam, a place which is roughly industrial but nonetheless filled with idiosyncratic charm.
