A Portrait of things
Meeting with Edith Dekyndt

Edith Dekyndt’s installation entitled A Portrait of Things turns towards that, which is inhuman: other living beings, the substance of sculpture and nature itself. A piece of cloth, when submerged in an aquarium, seems to become a subaqueous being and come alive before our very eyes, blurring the border between the organic and inorganic.

This disturbing, oneiric installation, which resembles an exhibit from a natural history museum, is an expression of fascination with inorganic matter and the way it can be perceived and experienced. The artist conjectures about man’s difficult relationship with ecology, with an emphasis on the inability of separating nature from objects.

A portrait of things depicts an “alien body”, a disturbing transformation straight out of Franz Kafka, whom the artist often quotes – metaphorically and notionally – in her work. Her sculptures have much in common with the Odradek, the creature from Kafka’s “The Care of a Family Man”. It’s dynamic identity is born not from stability, but constant movement and transformation it surrenders to. 

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