Marjan Teeuwen Dutch, b. 1953

Marjan Teeuwen (b. 1953) creates monumental architectural installations within buildings destined for demolition, transforming their destruction into an act of radical composition. Working for months with the fabric of the building itself, she dismantles and rearranges walls, windows, doors, ceilings, and other architectural elements into dense, carefully ordered structures, punctuated by voids and apertures that admit light. She then photographs these environments with a large-format camera. The installations are ultimately demolished along with the buildings that contain them; the photographs remain as their enduring form. Within these images, devastation acquires an extraordinary formal equilibrium, as destruction and construction become inseparable forces.

Born in Venlo in 1953, Teeuwen studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg from 1982 to 1984 and at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design St Joost in Breda from 1984 to 1988. Working across performance, painting, installation, and photography, she has developed a practice in which architecture becomes both material and subject, and the photograph serves as the definitive record of an otherwise ephemeral work. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

Her ongoing series Destroyed House, which she regards as her life’s work, began in 2008 with the transformation of buildings in the Netherlands awaiting demolition. Stripping their interiors and reconstructing them from their own rubble, Teeuwen creates near-monochromatic sculptural environments in which traces of the original architecture—doorways, windows, floors, and walls—remain legible even as their familiar functions are radically displaced. The resulting installations occupy a compelling space between architecture, sculpture, and photography. Temporary yet monumental, they invite local communities to enter and experience them before the buildings are destroyed and the works survive only through their photographic representations.

The series has extended from social housing in Rotterdam-Zuid and Amsterdam-Noord to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 2009, as well as locations in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, Arles, and Kyoto. Her projects have involved extended periods of work in Russia, Gaza, France, and Japan, each shaped by the particular histories and conditions of its site. In 2016, she spent three months in Gaza reconstructing a house destroyed by bombing. In a territory marked by conflict and devastation, the process acquired an especially profound resonance, and the work was received locally as a gesture of hope. Destroyed House Brutus, created in Rotterdam in 2024, extends the project into the realm of semi-permanent public art.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presented Destroyed House in February 2018, marking Teeuwen’s first gallery exhibition outside Europe. Her distinctions include the Grand Prix of the Krasnoyarsk Biennale in 2009 and second prize at the same biennale in 2011, the Heineken Culture Award of ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2005, and a nomination for the Van Lanschot Kunstprijs in 2016. During the 50th anniversary of Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, in 2019 Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen, as a highlight of the festival, created her first French installation by reconstructing a 19th-century building for her ongoing Destroyed House project, she accompanied the project by an exhibition of her past photographic works. 

Her work has been exhibited at Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, ARCAM in Amsterdam, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, and the KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival in Kyoto.