I want to understand how her work plays in the contemporary world. What is new about her work?
How are different between scientific experiments and artistic experiments?
Is it about awareness by slowing down and observing carefully objects?
Is her work performance as experiment itself or photo as evidence of the experiment or video as record of the experiment?
Edith Dekyndt
Born in 1960 in Ypres (BE). Lives and works in Tournai (BE)
1997
Video colour, no sound
durée : 6'05''
Year of Purchase: 2008
Edith Dekyndt’s work employs a timeless repertoire of physical facts which, although registered empirically, open onto illusion and the uncanny. Ghostly and yet material, her project makes us aware of the working of the world. By focusing our attention on a minimal action that remains tied to natural elements and phenomena (irisation, air and water currents, etc), without tampering with reality, the artist’s creative gesture becomes an experimental way of being in the world. At the same time, it guides our eye to contemplate water, color, air, and space, thus awakening our curiosity about the fabulous character of the mechanisms that govern our life.Video colour, no sound
durée : 6'05''
Year of Purchase: 2008
At odds with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, Slow Object 04 (1997) belongs to a video series begun in 1997 which focuses on the slow mobility of different elements. In this case, the close-up video shows delicate manipulation of a rubber disc bobbing up and down in slow motion in an aquarium. As if in a state of weightlessness, the object bends and slightly deforms, barely altering its shape. Although everything is in the open, the eye needs time to acclimatize and understand the strange motivity of the object.
Encountering the work is like entering a dream: it’s that moment of dislocation when reality begins to be dysfunctional but remains sufficiently meaningful so that it doesn’t clash with its structural referents. Rather than resort to artifice, Edith Dekyndt guides the viewer’s gaze to a pivotal point where everything becomes unhinged, and ushers in dream desire in an effort to produce disorientation.
As much symbolic as it is natural, the recurring appearance of the artist’s hands in her videos plays the role of a tuning fork that sets the tone of sensible human experience in grips with the real. Like a primitive implement, seemingly insignificant but in fact essential, the hands mediate the intelligibility of the surrounding world. The manipulation, which corresponds to the handling of an instrument rather than to a maneuver meant to distort reality, invites the viewer to look at the world the way one would at an unfamiliar object, picking it up and turning it around in order to analyze it. Like a child who discovers the world, Dekyndt’s work courts that ever-refreshed innocence, keen on according time to attention and concentration necessary for the beauty of the “insignificant” to reveal itself. This sensible position has nothing to do with an angelic posture; it is akin to a force of calm: a serene, quasi-unshakable presence which acts without disturbing, paving the way for an ethics of universality, for the non-obsequious respect for the world and its contingent forces.
A is hotter than B
2005
Video colour, no sound
durée : 9'
Year of Purchase: 2008
Video colour, no sound
durée : 9'
Year of Purchase: 2008
Have you noticed the artist’s appetency for titles mimetically playing on so-called scientific objectivity? It is very interesting to observe the way Edith Dekyndt formalizes her references to the physical world. A is hotter than B (2005) is a video showing the dissolution of a drop of ink captured in an ice-cube which disintegrates between the artist’s fingers. While the rigorous title assumes the status of a mathematical formula, it contrasts with the majesty of the ample, harmonious movement of the colored liquid. The arabesque lines are a function of water temperature: when it’s cold, ink spreads sluggishly, maintaining a compact form, but as the water warms up, ink diffuses more rapidly. As our gaze follows the turns and twirls of the spiraling forms that appear to be the simplest expression of chiaroscuro, the shape attains its denouement in its dissolution. Astonished by so much beauty, our eye loses itself among the details of the sensuous curves, while our attention subsides as if distracted and magnetized by the majesty of the movement. Obeying a dynamic embodied in turns by laboratory practices of evasion and observation, the work thrives on the attentive gaze directed toward the physical world. The climax lies on the side of the Stimmung—a German concept studied by numerous disciplines (philosophy, esthetics, literature), which could be summed up as an expression of harmonious unity and a sensation of plenitude experienced in front of a landscape, so potent as to engender a desire to be absorbed in that landscape, to become the landscape.
Edith Dekyndt craves changes in the states of matter, luminous irisation, ballets of dust, or yet fluid or aerial movements. She shows the marvelous concealed in the laws of physics without mathematical or Cartesian demonstration, but rather by giving free rein to individual curiosity. In Dekyndt’s work, the displacement responding to the motions of the liquid or of air is always a movement-generating figure. Just as François Mauriac who observed that “dust is not quite nothing,” Edith Dekyndt elaborates the perception of reality of a world in perpetual motion. The desire for mobility also brings about the changes in states (liquid/solid – visible/invisible) by relying on the immediacy of the sensible qualities even while revealing them.
In her thirst for experimentation, Edith Dekyndt proposes situations capable of capturing the intuition of the instant. To experience the work is to accept a state of temporal suspension which allows for the interiorization of emotion and brings inner calm. As we approach the work, all feelings of anxiety appear inadequate; the work soothes and regenerates, like musical silence distanced from the hubbub of the frenzied city. Opening onto a feeling of serenity which enables its comprehension, the work overwhelms and cuts short any feeling of confusion or discomfort.
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PROVISORY OBJECT SERIES, 1997–2004
DVD projections, edition 7/10
Running times variable
Pending Acquisition Funds, 2011
Running times variable
Pending Acquisition Funds, 2011
Provisory Object 01, 1997
Running time: 2 minutes, 29 seconds
Running time: 2 minutes, 29 seconds
Provisory Object 02, 2000
Running time: 1 minute, 55 seconds
Running time: 1 minute, 55 seconds
Provisory Object 03, 2004
Running time: 1 minute, 57 seconds
Running time: 1 minute, 57 seconds
Edith Dekyndt experiments with the physical limitations of matter and how the “lives” of these elements are often imperceptible to the human eye. In 1999, she founded the groundbreaking group Universal Research of Subjectivity, which focuses on the promotion and dissemination of works of art that center on minimal and conceptual forms. Working in a variety of media, such as text, video, and simple technology, Dekyndt seeks to question what she calls “both the individual and global positions of people in society” by exploring the limits of the relationship between art, science, and reality.
The three works that make up her “Provisory Object” series focus, in fixed shots, on a sequence of experiments she conducted in different atmospheric conditions with a bubble of soapy water collected in two hands. In each instance, the ephemerality of the soapy water determines the length of the work. The first work in the series,Provisory Object 01, 1997, was filmed in Belgium at 16°C (61°F). Here, the soapy water forms a dazzling, colorful membrane of light that occupies the diamond shape formed by the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. The imagery is reminiscent of childhood and the dazzling surface of a breath-blown bubble against the summer sun. In Provisory Object 02, 2000, filmed in Canada at -20°C (-4°F), the bubble’s membrane becomes transparent and shrinks after a few moments of contact with the cold. In the third and final experiment, Provisory Object 03, 2004, filmed in the Congoat 25°C (77° F), the soapy water takes on a more visceral appearance and survives for the shortest length of time.
VIDEOS
Edith Deyndt "Slow Object 03" rubber band video
Edith Deyndt "A is hotter than B"
Edith Dekyndt "worthlessness" plastic bag flying video
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