“Palou”, Dennis Buckland was born in Cape Town and lives and works between Amsterdam and South Africa. They make videos, drawings and installations, which are often combined with or activated by performance.
Their fascination for systems of understanding often leads to intensive research into the lexicon and methodology of a particular body of knowledge. Such systems necessarily have to claim a domain that excludes alternative interpretations. Buckland is interested in what happens when the logic of one sphere is disrupted or contrasted by another- assimilating apparently contradictory experiences.
Most frequently, an impersonal scientific gaze is confused with one more personal, poetic. Concerened with placing themselves in the world, the scientific and the poetic are tools for creating connections. While one uses language as a mediator, the other allows for more immediate relationships between body and landscape.
The double and the absurd are useful tools for performing this assimilation. Buckland often works collaboratively as a means of creating a double, where dialogue across a dichotomy can result in an absurdity into which a viewer is placed. Being located in the Netherlands and working with material from a distant home country is another double in which they find themselves; this state persists even at home, where the legacy of colonialism makes belonging a complex claim.
Most recently Buckland has been navigating the simultanious familiarity and strangeness that the Afrikaans language evokes for Dutch speaking audiences to create experiences of complex cultural entanglements.