Ria Pacquée made her international breakthrough in the 1980s with her performance series featuring the characters she created: ‘Madame’ and ‘It’. Infiltrating reality by means of these two personae, she carries out an artistic investigation of the thin, dividing line between the fictional and the actual. In more recent work she has tended to concentrate on photographic and video productions, in which the experiences gained as a performance artist still play an important role. As a spectator of public life (photographs and videos) and participant (performances) she tries to find answers to the most elementary questions of existence. In this respect the ‘street’ is her area of study. She sees the street as a living setting in which she moves discreetly, recording events from a particular viewpoint with a camera. Her interest in ritual, anonymity, city-wandering and collecting of concomitant sounds and images, recreation and appropriation of reality by extracting details from their everyday context, are also important themes in her work.
