Els Dietvorst

"I am going to take you on a tour through my work. It will be a story tour because stories are what link us as humans. Stories make us exist, make us connect through time and space."

Els Dietvorst (°1964) is a socially engaged artist. She uses dialogue, experiment and intuition as her main artistic strategies. Ever since the 1990s, she has been moved by social issues such as migration, racism and climate change. Dietvorst reflects on the human condition. As a result, major themes such as life and death, anxiety, alienation and desire are addressed in her work. She focuses particularly on the position of the outsider, pointing her gaze to/aiming her attention at those people and events that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Her choice of medium, whether it be actions, documentaries, films, mud sculptures, installations, drawings or theater texts, depends on the specific circumstances and the individual nature of each project. Many of her artworks have therefore been given away or destroyed, or have perished.

In 2020, many of these works were remade again for the exhibition *Dooltocht/A desperate quest to find a base for hope at M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp). She is currently researcher on a PhD: "Partisans of the Real" at the Royal Academy / University of Antwerp.

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Dirk Braeckman

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E-101-92, 1992

Dirk Braeckman

Other , 50 x 50 cm

Gelatin silver print

From 1992 onwards Braeckman creates “portraits” in which the gaze is covered or averted. This work marks the beginning of this new strategy. This relatively small photograph shows a close up of the back of a woman’s head. By averting the model’s gaze, the sitter is depersonalised and the image is ‘un-portrayed’. The effect creates a more abstract, more suggestive and less descriptive image. After creating E-101-92, Braeckman goes on to make a photo series of a half-naked woman, whose face is covered by her long hair.

For these series, Braeckman first uses a code as a title. Since then, the titles of Braeckman’s photographic work consist of letters and numbers. These codes can refer to cities, dates, classification numbers of people who were present when the photo was taken.

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