JOKE VDH
P009 →“134340” Posture editions 18, March 2016
72 Pages, 21x30 cm, ‘tabernacle’publication accompanying videowork
ISBN 978 94 9126 218 0
with text by Koen Sels
http://www.posture-editions.com/editions
“He constructs his own poem out of elements of the poem in front of him” (J. Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator)
As suggested by Ranciere I construct my own practice from the visual, historical and physical elements of specific environs from which I extract enough raw materials to initiate the making of work.
In 2015 I started researching for a publication when I was in Baltimore, USA, where I have been going every year since I was 18 years old.
Being in Baltimore on itself I always received as problematic and it definitely opened my eyes years ago to the precarious state the USA deals with slavery and colonialism, or in other words still cultivates them.
2015 and all its imagery came at great speed and it impacted negatively on me. The war in Syria, the crisis in Greece, the immigrant crisis, Iconoclasm .. These news burdened me wondering how to deal critically as an artist with these inputs.
I bought regularly the NY times and the only news that gave me a sense of relief where the amazing and inspiring images taken by the space craft New Horizon of Pluto and it’s surface. That was the starting point for my research and from there both a book and a video – 134340 - came to be: Pluto and Iconoclasm.
Koen Sels wrote the preface of my publication and it reads:
The work expresses above all a melancholic desire to search in the rubble of what is broken, to link together the dots, in the heavens and here below, to make a drawing once again. Not in order to arrive at an unbreakable circle, but to be still truly involved and personal. Which means: building up a subjective resistance to both the fragmentation of images and the urge to let a moving multiplicity implode into a point of meaning.