Joost Conijn chooses to travel to areas where others do not venture or which are difficult to reach. For him, the joy of his travel around the world resides in the unforeseen events along the way. It is th adventure, and his encounters with others, that form the core of his work which he documents in various videos.
In 1997, one expression of his art was to take the front fenders and doors from a DS and make a tubular structure that would support them while using the fenders as gates that could automatically (by mechanical means) be opened as they were approached by a vehicle. And where to place these gates? Joost loaded the parts onto a trailer that was towed with a Peugeot 404, then assembled in the Sahara desert!
You have to love an artist that will travel to the end of the earth to express himself. Of course, if Joost Conijn were to try that in Canada, the gates would rust out in one winter!
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Conijn spent part of his childhood in Brabant, a province in the south of The Netherlands. He studied between 1992 and 1995 at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Subsequently he studied from 1995 to 1997 at the Sandberg Institute .
He was the winner of the Charlotte Köhler Prize for young visual artists in 2000, and the Cobra Art Prize in 2005. He was also nominated for the Prix de Rome 2005.
Today, Joost Conijn is known as one of the most autonomous and extraordinary artists with his work, which is impossible to classify into only one discipline.