Standing in the Corner at 11:15 a.m.
In a small white room of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, hangs Inge Meijer’s 11:15 a.m., 2020, from her series April Fool, 2020. The print is large, but strangely quiet. You almost walk past it. Then the details begin to arrange themselves.
If we stay with the image for a moment and really let it unfold, we begin to see this: a man stands in the corner, face to the wall, as if he has decided to disappear into the line, where two planes meet. He wears a long dark coat that falls straight down, giving his body a heavy, vertical weight. On his head - a pointed white hat. It is too tall to be innocent. It carries the old language of ridicule, the dunce cap from some forgotten classroom. Opposite him, across a strip of wooden floor, there is a camera on a tripod. It is patient, alert, perfectly still. A cable runs from the man’s feet to the machine, a thin black sentence written across the floorboards. It’s not clear who is in charge - the person in the corner or the object pointed at him.
The room itself is almost nothing: a scraped wall, a radiator just visible at the edge, a bit of window, a dull light that doesn’t want to dramatise anything. No colour, no decoration, just that stretch of wall between man and camera. It feels like the true subject of the photograph is the distance between them.
The title insists on a particular time: 11:15 a.m., 2020. Late morning in a year that bent everyone out of shape. The time sounds harmless, halfway between coffee and lunch, yet in the picture it becomes heavy. You can imagine the minutes piling up against the man’s spine as he stands there. Maybe he has already been there for a while. Maybe he just arrived. The photograph does not tell.
April Fool, 2020: a name that tastes slightly bitter. The day of jokes, arriving in a year, when the joke never felt funny. We were all inside small rooms then, inventing ways to structure the hours, turning living spaces into stages. Some people baked bread. Some people learned new skills. Others arranged their furniture just to feel that time was moving. Screens became windows and every call felt like a small performance in front of a soft, indifferent audience. Inge Meijer seems to have built a ritual of standing still and being watched, as if to say: if the world has shrunk to four walls and a camera, then let’s at least look that reality in the eye, or turn our backs to it and let it look at us. Her April Fool is not a prank, but a quiet agreement with the absurd: people will play along with this strange script, they will endure the scene and they will let the image remember that we all once lived like this.
There is no teacher in this room, no judge, no audience. Until we step into it. The only witness is the camera. Its presence changes everything. The punishment becomes a performance, the performance becomes an image, the image is framed and hung on a museum wall. By the time we are here, the man can no longer move. His shame has dried into ink.
Nevertheless, I keep returning to the distance between the man and the camera. They face each other like two quiet opponents, locked in a stare neither of them has eyes for. The man offers his back, his bowed head, the ridiculous height of the white cone, the camera offers its patient, glassy gaze. It feels less like a simple act of observation and more like a pact. He isn’t just being recorded, he is cooperating with the recording, giving himself over to it. You can almost imagine a small, unseen gesture - a finger moving, a signal given - through which he decides the exact moment this posture will harden into an image. In that sense he is both subject and accomplice, the one who endures the humiliation and the one who chooses when it will be preserved. The photograph becomes a negotiation between exposure and control: how far you are willing to go in letting a machine, and whoever stands behind it, turn your private posture into something permanent?
That thought changes the atmosphere. The work is no longer about a powerless body punished by some external authority. It becomes about the way we internalise that authority, how we stand in our own corners, how we aim cameras at ourselves and call it documentation, self-knowledge, content.
The longer I stay with the image, the more it tilts uneasily between comedy and cruelty. The hat is ridiculous, but the scene is not funny. The joke doesn’t land. Instead it hangs in the air, thin and uncomfortable, like laughing at the wrong moment. The man’s posture is not childlike. There is something adult and tired in the way his shoulders round forward, in the way he surrenders his face to the wall. It is not only shame. It is also exhaustion.
Moving on to the next point, in the museum, the print is accompanied by the short text of April Fool, where Meijer writes about the strange choreography of the early pandemic: the fear, the stillness, the rituals we invented to make the days bearable. You don’t need to read it to feel that context. It’s already in the photograph - the sense of being alone and observed at the same time, of staging yourself for an invisible audience.
I imagine the moment of making the work. Setting up the tripod, testing the light, pulling the cable straight. Putting on the long coat, the cone, walking to the corner. Turning away. Choosing not to see the camera anymore, only to feel it. Then the click or maybe the silent blink of a timer. The image happening somewhere behind your back.
By the time we meet the work in the Stedelijk, something has shifted. Looking at 11:15 a.m., 2020 now, from the safe distance of the museum, that year feels far and close at once. The photograph doesn’t scream about the pandemic, it just holds a small, concentrated piece of it: the absurdity of our self-discipline, the way we collaborated with our own confinement. There is no dramatic gesture, no breakdown, only a body that continues to stand there, because it said it would. What moves me most, is how gentle the work is, despite everything. The man is not mocked by the artist, he is protected by the slowness of the image. The camera does not hunt him, it simply waits. The light is soft. The punishment is quiet. Shame is not spectacular here - it’s just a posture, a habit, a way of inhabiting space.
You leave the room at the Stedelijk and carry the picture with you like a small echo. It returns in other corners: the way you hunch over your phone, the way you step out of a video call and still feel watched, the way you sometimes turn your face to the wall for a second, for no reason at all.
Inge Meijer’s photograph does not ask for forgiveness or promise transformation. It simply shows a human being standing in a room at 11:15 a.m. in 2020, wired to a machine that remembers everything. And in that very specific moment, something strangely universal appears: the fragile theatre of control we build around ourselves, the quiet, slightly ridiculous ways we try to live with being seen.
