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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SCULPTURES [SCULPTUREN]

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(c)image: M HKA

Driftwood, 2015

Els Dietvorst

Sculpture

wood

The Skull series are sculptures that are made to be symbolical metaphors for every war. The first sculpture was a huge skull, made of wood and loam, built in Antwerp.

The next Skull was made on the roof of the M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp and was a reaction on the War on terror.

“In 2009, on the roof of M HKA in Antwerp, she exhibited the gigantic work Skull, a figure in a cage, fashioned from mud and wood. This powerfully visual work is Dietvorst’s way of reacting to the numerous images of war that the media floods us with. This specific work alludes to Guantanamo; to solitary confinement in cages. Dietvorst made a life-sized model of one of them, inhabited by a gigantic skull. On the roof of the museum, the head appears to be imprisoned in a dovecote, which can be viewed from a nearby bench. After a while, two pigeons built their nest in the cage and hatched out their eggs there – thus a piece about murder facilitates the creation of new life at a totally different level…”(source; Eva Wittocx, ED2)

The third Skull was made in the biennal of Moscow. The form of the Skull was inspired by a skull of a neanderthal man that lived in Eurasia. In that time Neanderthalers and the new immigrants, the homo sapiens, lived peacefully together. This tooth is the symbol for immigration, respect and human transcendence.

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