Exploring the Art of Female Friendship: Melissa Schriek
Artist Feature · Meijburg Art Commission 2024
Melissa
Schriek
Photographs of the world between what happens and what could — on female friendship, the Dutch landscape, and the disposable camera that started it all
The Photographer
A disposable camera on a primary school field trip. A girl composing shots, directing classmates, choosing backgrounds with the instinct of someone who already knows. That was where it started for Melissa Schriek — and the instinct has never really changed, only deepened. Now nominated for the prestigious Meijburg Art Commission at Unseen Amsterdam 2024, Schriek has built a practice around female friendship, performative staging, and a particular kind of image that sits exactly on the border between the real and the dreamed.
Scenarios
There is a word Melissa Schriek keeps returning to when she describes what her photographs are: scenarios. Not staged fabrications, not documentary captures — scenarios. Things that could happen. Situations that carry the texture of reality even when the light is wrong, even when the body is held at an angle that life rarely holds it, even when the space between two women feels charged with something ordinary photography doesn't usually reach.
This is the territory she has staked out since the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague reoriented her gaze — away from merely portraying reality and toward the sculptural relationship between bodies and the environments they occupy. Dance and gymnastics in her past gave her something most photographers don't have: an understanding of movement as form, of the body as an architectural object in space.
"Despite the dreamy, surreal quality of her work, she maintains that the core is human stories — and photographs must still look like a scenario that could happen."
On Observation
The surrealist painters are an influence. So are Viviane Sassen and Paul Kooiker. But the deepest research happens, as it always does for the best photographers, in ordinary observation — how people move, dress, interact, the unremarkable choreography of everyday life that turns remarkable the moment someone is paying close enough attention.
"Very mundane objects I can find interesting and hyperfocus on," she says. It is not a confession of quirk. It is a description of practice.
The Dutch Landscape
The pandemic, as it did for many artists, produced an unexpected gift wrapped in difficulty. Schriek has Australian heritage and compares the two landscapes with the frankness of someone who grew up hearing what landscape can actually do. Flat, lacking sun, boring. But enforced proximity changed the terms. Suddenly the flatness was the point. The absence of drama forced a different kind of attention, and out of that attention came work that found something in the familiar environment she had been too mobile to see before.
It is a small thing, and also a large one: an artist learning to love what she'd dismissed by being made to stay with it long enough to look properly.
The Work
ODE
ODE is the work that crystallises what Schriek is after. A series built around female friendship, around sisterhood, around the specific and underrepresented reality of what women are to each other when the cameras of mass media aren't framing them as rivals or cautionary tales.
She was struck — and the right word is struck, because it implies something landing hard — by how consistently media portrays female bonds as toxic, dramatic, competitive. ODE is the counter-argument made in images: best friends in their natural environments, the power and togetherness that Schriek has always admired and always found inadequately documented.
"I sought to document a different side of friendship, capturing the power and togetherness I have always admired." It is not a polemic. It is not a correction delivered from a position of argument. It is, simply, photography that looks at the world it actually sees rather than the world it has been told to expect.
Creative Process
Experimentation
Whether refreshing her practice or sharpening existing abilities, Schriek believes you learn by doing something new and not being afraid to fail. At some point, you just understand it.
Intuition over system
She juggles multiple projects simultaneously, intuitively dropping those that become uninteresting or best suited for another time. The discipline is in the attention, not the method.
The body as architecture
Dance and gymnastics in her past gave her an understanding of movement as form. In her graduation project, she draped bodies in different poses around the city to examine how bodies relate to their spaces.
Inspirations and Influences
Viviane Sassen and Paul Kooiker. Surrealist painters. Mundane objects and hyperfocus. Daily life — how people walk, dress, move, interact. The body in public space. Dance. Gymnastics. The women in her life.
Recognition
Unseen Amsterdam
2024
Schriek is nominated for the Meijburg Art Commission at Unseen Amsterdam 2024, announced at Westergasfabriek on 20–22 September 2024. The award exists to give photography talent the space to develop new work and bring it to a wider audience.
Schriek is exactly the kind of artist it was designed for: someone whose best work is already remarkable and whose next direction is genuinely unpredictable.
Unseen and Art Rotterdam join forces starting in March 2026 — the photography fair will be featured as part of Art Rotterdam. Unseen Amsterdam brings together important developments in contemporary photography and makes them available to the public, enriched with exhibitions, lectures, debates, films, and photobook presentations. Learn more at Unseen Amsterdam.
2024 Nominees — Meijburg Art Commission
Gallery
Hama Gallery
Amsterdam · Nederland
Melissa Schriek (Hama Gallery, Amsterdam), Lee-Ann Olwage (The Bridge Gallery, Paris), Gilleam Trapenberg (Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam), Klaas Kloosterboer (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam), Anna Fabricius (TOBE Gallery, Budapest).