Exploring systems of belief and personal mythology
Floris Schönfeld
Floris Schönfeld (1982) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. He works mainly with installation, film and performance. His main focus as an artist is in exploring systems of belief and personal mythology. The stories people build and maintain to give meaning and purpose to the world around them. He is interested in how these narratives come into being and how their meaning changes over time – but most of all in these stories as sites of potential transformation and radical reimagining. In the last years Schönfeld has become increasingly interested in the human relationship with technology and how this relationship plays out in the natural world. In this time he has instigated numerous projects in which human, animal and artificial intelligence entities co-inhabit speculative worlds. These hybridisations reflect a world in which all entities are intimately entangled with each other.
Biografie
He holds a BA in Time Based Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and an MFA studio practice degree from the California College of Art in San Francisco. He was a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the San Francisco and has done residencies at Rupert in Vilnius and the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Schönfeld’s work has been shown at many film festivals and exhibitions including the Amsterdam Film Biennale, Rencontres International Paris/Madrid/Berlin, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 12th International Shanghai Biennal, the International Ghetto Biennale Port-au-Prince, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, the Kassel Documentary & Film Festival and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco. His work has the subject of a solo shows at di Rosa Napa, the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco, Nest The Hague, MUAC Mexico City, CAC Vilnius and the Oakland Museum..