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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Zelfportret nr.35, 1990

Dirk Braeckman

Photography , 54 x 54 cm

gelatin silver print

"In the first period I started, although I was already physically dealing with the print, very emphatically from photography. Also, my work was viewed exclusively in photographic circles. I limited myself to the portrait and in a sense, in so doing I locked myself up in photography. But the gaze of the portrayed was too determinant. So I did very consciously turn away from the gaze and made a series of portraits without eye contact, it were photographs where the gaze was literally averted. Precisely the absence of that contact became the subject of the photographs."

Bert Danckaert, Schilderkunst lijkt steeds meer op fotografie: Dirk Braeckman wint Cultuurprijs Beeldende Kunst, H ART, 16 February 2006

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