Caroline Girardot-Bijnen
she/her
Dutch
girardotbijnen.org @carolinegirardotbijnen
Thesis: Understand your madness — urgency and purposelessness, life as a work of art
Have you ever held someone’s heart?
And squeezed it to keep it alive?
As a surgeon, I came into direct contact with life and death — not as abstract concepts, but as something vulnerable, physical and immediate. A question began there that has never left me: what does it mean to live a truthful life?
My work emerges from that question. In my installations, I explore how inner experience becomes entangled with the structures through which we orient ourselves: beliefs, language, rituals, images and systems of meaning. The external world does not merely stand opposite the self; it has already entered the body.
Within these spaces, elements accumulate and begin to act on one another. I place them together not to illustrate a fixed narrative, but to let them question, disturb and alter one another.
I am drawn to paradoxes, to the slipperiness and invisibility of truth. To the moment when something that seemed self-evident begins to shift, and you can no longer fully rely on what you thought you knew.
Truth does not lie in something outside us that can simply be pointed to, but in what resonates within — and sets something in motion.
