comfortt turlurons _Nostalgie
in Cavalli Basel, Basel, Switzerland, from 14 Jun 2026 to 15 Aug 2026
The revolution never arrived. It changed its skin. While some continued to search for it among the ruins of grand narratives, capital learned another craft, inhabiting the nerves, organizing dreams, administering desire. The female body was one of its earliest laboratories.
In Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven's collages this process is not narrated but dismantled and restaged. Images drawn from different domains, sexuality, medicine, popular culture, technical language, are brought together until they lose their apparent stability. The body does not appear as a compact unity, but as a surface traversed by forces, codes, and information that overlap and transform one another.
To look at these works is to witness a mutation. The old binaries, natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, intimacy and control, gradually cease to function. What remains is an unstable field of relations, a restless surface, continuously rewritten through montage.
Power, after all, does not merely organize labor, it produces perceptions, constructs fantasies, shapes identities. In Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven's work there is no nostalgia for an authentic, lost, or untainted body. That body never existed. What exists instead are points of interference, zones where different systems of representation collide. The female body appears as an archive traversed by heterogeneous forces, capital, medicine, scientific language, desire, media imagery. None of these registers ultimately prevails over the others, instead they accumulate and overlap.
The American writer Gertrude Stein intuited that language does not merely describe reality but contributes to producing it through repetition. A repeated word ceases to be transparent and becomes material. Meaning is not located behind words but in their continuous return, in the minimal shifts introduced by each repetition.
Something similar happens in these collages. Fragments of faces, anatomical details, formulas, and images drawn from different registers return from one work to another. But this return never coincides with identity, each element is displaced, recontextualized, forced into new relationships. Difference is produced through repetition, and mutation takes shape through montage.
The body then also ceases to be a stable form and becomes a syntax. In this sense her practice approaches a the context that produced it and compelled to generate new meanings. certain tradition of feminist avant gardes. No code retains its authority intact, each fragment is stripped from the context that produced it and compelled to generate new meanings.
And perhaps language serves precisely this purpose, not to console, nor to offer reassuring images of the world, but to interrupt the codes that organize it. Anne-Mie Van Kerkhoven's works do not promise an escape route. They produce interference, open short circuits, and show that what we call identity, nature, or memory is always the result of editing/artifice.
text by Costanza Candeloro
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