NINA KARIM van Oort

A NEW YEAR

2011 - ...

A New Year started out with a ritual that I've been doing every New Year’s Eve since my seventeenth. Together with the group of friends, just before midnight and no matter the circumstances, I would do an “around-the-table”. We would all sit at a table and create a moment together. I love to reflect and philosophise on life and cant help it to involve other people. The simple formula of the night: Tell about the most gripping and impressive moment you've experienced that year. Then finish it off with a wish for the year to come.

It’s the same every year. Although the fireworks in the background continues, the group, that at first would be filled with new-years nerves, seems to calm down and just listens. Emotional conversations emerge about big themes like love and death. From 2011 on I began to record these around-the-table and started calling it my "New Years Archive". Over the years the location changed, friends where replaced by others and themes and subjects seemed to grow-up just like we are still doing.

This project remains unfinished, while every year the archive is growing, until I feel it really captured life and time.