At the beginning of 2018 I started the research project 'Sculpture as a flexible ephemerality'. My question concerned the meaning of sculpture as a static medium in a rapidly changing world. As a methodology I used the changing conditions between creation and destruction.
In the course of the research the term destruction changed into transformation, because the new form still carries the old one, but in a paradoxical way. This transformation of the images took place on the basis of happenings or events.
In a later step, the work of art was literally fragmented to be distributed as a souvenir among the visitors of the exhibition. This led to the following question: Can a work of art be stripped of its static character by inscribing it in a cyclical system of recovery and recycling? Each work of art has a metamorphosis in the viewer's memory, does it still exist in its original physical form?
In the PhD I want to go deeper into the memory that functions as a medium and the physical work of art that is reduced to the technical carrier of the concept. Is the artwork the packaging of an idea, just as our economic system stimulates the consumer with evocative packaging? The content is processed and the packaging is temporary and seductive. In this way I question the material character of a work of art by viewing it as a changeable carrier of an immaterial message that is shaped and reformed by the viewer's memory.
I want to connect this system in art to our daily world of consumption, recycling and our related economic system. My artistic practice functions as a case study.
Promotors: Thomas Crombez (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp) & Peter De Deyn (UAntwerp)
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