About Barbara Visser

Barbara Visser is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator with a focus on cultural and historical narratives, and the way they are perceived through art, design and public media. Her projects navigate the uncertain relationship between documentation and dramatisation, and question different ways of storytelling and image-making in order to provoke a new perception of what normality has rendered invisible.  

During her stay at IAS, Visser will work on the development of a cinematographic essay called Unfluence, which takes mimetic human behaviour as a starting point for a personally driven narrative about our relation to originality and authenticity in a culture that is increasingly shaped by algorithms. Can ‘authenticity’ and ‘intrinsic drive’– features so often attributed to ‘real’ artists – be digitally feigned? Does the use of A.I. generally affect our behaviour and mental capacities, our identity; does social media inform or reduce our sense of self, and how do the arts and the artist fit into that constellation?
Does the dissonant voice grow in importance in times of digital domination, or will anomalies be erased by the largest common denominator?

Vissers’ aim to connect different domains in art, science and daily life, spurred her to take on different positions in the field, besides her practice as a maker. She was Chair of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts (KNAW/AVK 2014 – 2017), Artistic Director of Documentary Filmfestival IDFA (A.I., 2017) and developed a Temporary Master Program called “F for Fact” at the Rietveld/Sandberg Instituut (2020 – 2024), where she explored new forms of documentary storytelling and the role of imagination in relation to what we perceive as knowledge, fact and truth.

Barbara Visser studied photography and audiovisual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Cooper Union in New York and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. From 1992 onwards, her work has been shown internationally and has been awarded The A.H. Heineken Prize, The David Roëll Prize, The Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildenwart Prize and the Dutch Cultural Media Fund Documentary Award, among others.