Justine Kurland is incldued in FOTODOK's group exhibition Off the Grid, with work by Lucas Foglia, Bertus Gerssen, Justine Kurland, Pavel Prokopchik and Corine Vermeulen.
Conscious living, carbon footprint reduction and self-sufficiency are hot. Yet only a few people drastically change their lives. In Off the Grid, we see lifestyle choices that differ from the norm: from radical self-sufficiency to a more pragmatic search for harmony with nature. Although the representation of these lifestyles tends towards idyll and romance, Off the Grid shows that the reality is capricious and not always freely chosen.
Justine Kurland visited the last communes in America. She combines the group portraits she took with fragments about the loneliness of her itinerant existence and the dark thoughts that sometimes accompany it. Corine Vermeulen captures how nature is slowly taking over amid Detroit's urban decay and how the inhabitants, whether voluntarily or not, turn to alternative lifestyles. Bertus Gerssen’s work stays closer to home. Although Dutch society is neatly planned and regulated, Gerssen shows that here too people look for ways to shape their own lives.