Ronald Bal

Netherlands

Ronald Bal, born in 1984 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, creates performances, film and installations. By studying sign processes, he tries to grasp the conditions of communication between image and language. Reflecting on Hanna Pitkin’s idea of the ‘paradox of representation’, Bal makes work that collide association and meaning in vulnerable trans systems, politics and environment, economic technology and the human body. Bal aims to visualize dissonance between shape and content and diffuse alienated systems of translation.

Ronald Bal currently lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He has been a part of numerous exhibitions of which mentionable names are Extrapool in Nijmegen of Netherlands, Co-creation in the European Culture Centre in Venice of Italy and Performance Week in Luisa Catucci Gallery in Berlin of Germany. He has also participated in a number of residency programs such as the Cloud Danslab and the Winter School of Discontent in the Hague of Netherlands.

Work Title: Recarving Body Plant Image

Base: personal and digital, affection and alienation

The digital and the personal have an ambiguous relationship. Digitization grows out of its objects into the human body into our personal lives, but in turn our personal lives are just as important in the digital world. It seems the digital and personal immerse into one and can no longer exist without each other. Today’s phenomena as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have big data and (hidden) algorithm to support our daily live and commercials the system by knowing what we do and where we are. The digital has ‘affected’ all the personal into an ‘alienated’ self. The mobile is not only a tool for communication, it gives us a sense of place. Thanks to these developments the personal gets a new understanding in the digital world and urban infrastructures. Does our digital archive affect future decisions?

In his new project Recarving Body Plant Image Bal is played with the ‘affection’ and ‘alienation’ of personal data by rediscovering the four elements water, fire, wind and earth and his digital archive. He made digital films and photo of the four elements during the Biennale, and recreate a film of 2 hours of personal data.