Annet van der Voort was born in the Netherlands but has lived in Germany for a long time, where she began studying visual communication at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts and graduated in 1993. As a photo artist and publicist, she now lives and works in Drensteinfurt near Münster in North Rhine-Westphalia.
In her photo series, she deals with the complex themes of change, transience and memory in a diverse and sensitive way. The spectrum of motifs ranges from portraits and still lifes to landscape photographs that repeatedly focus on the sea. Her works have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Kunsthalle Rotterdam (NL), the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt, the Kunstmuseum Ahlen or the Museum of Photography in Odense (DK, today Kunstmuseum Brandts).
Annet van der Voort is still familiar with the North Sea from her childhood, when she spent the annual summer holidays with her family on the Dutch west coast. It was here that she encountered the first concrete bunkers, marked by decay, which are embedded in the coastal landscape, for the most part submerged in the sand, overgrown by vegetation or washed by the sea.
Decades later, they formed the starting point for the photo project "The Wall", in the context of which Annet van der Voort set out on the traces of the so-called "Atlantic Wall" and in doing so artistically explored the European west coast. During the Second World War, more than 100,000 concrete bunkers and other defensive structures were erected as a "belt of bulwarks" along the 6,000-kilometre-long coastline between the Spanish-French border and the North Cape in Norway to protect the German sphere of influence from military attacks by the Allies.
Along the North Sea coast of Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, too, there are many of these relics from long ago. In their massiveness, they are on the one hand an expression of former claims to power, but on the other hand they also show the fear and vulnerability behind them. In her photographs, van der Voort captures the fortified buildings individually and in a poetic harmony with the rough and barren nature on the coast.
For more than three years, van der Voort explored the west coast for the photo series "The Wall"; today there is hardly a Wadden Sea island that she does not know. However, she has never been to Föhr - until she was invited by the MKdW to Alkersum in 2020 as artist in residence. There are no concrete bunkers here; instead, the artist has discovered "talking gravestones". With inscriptions and symbolic representations carved in stone, they tell the story of the life of the deceased and thus fit perfectly into van der Voort's artistic spectrum of themes, the questions of identity, transience and memory.
Numerous such gravestones can be found in the Föhr cemeteries of St. Johannis Church in Nieblum, St. Laurentii in Süderende and Sankt Nikolai in Boldixum. However, Annet van der Voort would like to extend her photographic work and search for traces to the neighbouring islands of Amrum, Sylt and Rømø.
Annet van der Voort's first residency in March 2020 was abruptly interrupted shortly after arrival when the Corona crisis in Germany brought massive restrictions. The artist continued her work on Föhr in May/June 2021 and June 2022.
