amvk || Empreint_Jdirai

Empreint_Jdirai_Odissey
The Good Society
in Dépendance, Brussels, Belgium, from 22 Feb 2025 to 29 Mar 2025

dépendance VIEW is pleased to announce Empreint_Jdirai_Odissey (The Good Society), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s first solo with the gallery, marking a new chapter in her artistic career. The exhibition features a new body of work alongside historical pieces across various media, including collages, digital prints on Plexiglass and PVC, archival drawings, and a newly produced video.

For more than fifty years, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK) has carved out a unique path, celebrated for her collages, drawings, and mixed-media pieces that blend art with technology. Her career has been defined by constant innovation and an unwavering commitment to creation. Her early themes—philosophy, women images and knowledge representation (artificial intelligence)—continue to shape her recent work. Intuitive and unconventional, she dissolves contrasts between chaos and order, logic and mysticism, eroticism and technology. Through reflections, symmetries, and doublings, she reinterprets visual information and constructs a unique visual world blending diverse imagery with numerical symbolism and societal power structures.

With provocative imagery from soft porn, comics, and mass media, she weaves in references to literature, philosophy, music, feminism and counterculture. These elements transform her works into cultural time capsules that reflect both the era they emerged from and AMVK’s exploration of identity and interconnectedness. Her work captures the traces left behind by experience—how fragments of the past fold into the present, shaping what is seen and felt in the now. The echoes of moments, both joyous and painful, accumulate, forming a thread that feeds into the larger search for meaning. Her material choices remain consistent, with Plexiglas and plastics as a key medium with its synthetic nature symbolizing life’s malleability.

The exhibition title originates from Van Kerckhoven’s practice of repurposing unusual spam emails containing columns of randomly arranged words. Generated by digital algorithms and grouped into threes, these text combinations became foundations for titles of her artworks and exhibitions. AntiSade—our memory with eyes—boekentafel—op doorreis—energie keskia counterbalance—comeback-tome—the right depth—pourquoi l’âme conserve sa volonté— naughty boy—Empreint_Jdirai_Odissey— her titles function like coded messages, bridging linguistic play with deeper philosophical inquiries.

The exhibition premieres the movie Egypt 1960, a digital animation that reimagines a segment from the Egyptian musical film Farewell to Love, starring the singer Moharam Fouad, the grandfather of Belgian artist Tamino. The outcome is rendered in Van Kerckhoven’s signature style that intertwines digital manipulation and visual complexity. The video loop alternates between two versions: one with a domestic feel and another with a more cinematic scale.

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Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (1951, Belgium) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fridericianum, Kassel; M HKA, Antwerp; Kunstverein Hannover; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunstverein München; Mu.ZEE, Ostend; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; WIELS, Brussels and Kunsthalle Bern, among others. Her work has featured in group exhibitions at Mudam, Luxembourg; ICA, London; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Yale Union, Portland; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Bozar, Brussels; ICA Philadelphia and the Shanghai Art Museum. She will be included in the exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 at Kunsthalle Wien.

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