Artist: Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Exhibition title: Serving Compressed Energy with Vacuum
Co-Curated by: Chris Fitzpatrick and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Venue: Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany
Date: April 25 – June 14, 2015
Photography: Copyright and courtesy of Kunstverein München e.V.
From 25 April until 14 June 2015, Kunstverein München will present ‚Serving Compressed Energy with Vacuum’, an expansive exhibition featuring nearly 200 works produced by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven between
1975 and 2015. Curated by Chris Fitzpatrick with Van Kerckhoven, the exhibition will be the artist’s most comprehensive presentation to date. Many of the works are being exhibited here for the first time, but all of them will be installed in an interwoven and anti-chronological configuration to show her practice as an interminable continuum of forms and ideas.
For more than 40 years, Van Kerckhoven’s artistic practice has offered her a personal survival mechanism – a filter for processing her experience of life on earth, and for constructing its alternatives. This has fueled a complex corpus of interdisciplinary work, which she is still expanding daily.
Van Kerckhoven has used, amongst other materials, 16mm film and Super-8, animation, collage, computer graphics, drawing, installation, music and sound, photographs, plexiglass and PVC paintings, publications, scenography, sculptures, silkscreens, textiles, video, and Xerox. She tele-faxed serial text- and image-based “Reports” to friends (and foes) at will. She wrote, designed, and distributed printed “manuals” to explain her exhibitions, or “registered” those exhibitions as videos, which later became new layered works. In the early 1980s, she furthered her pioneering use of emerging computer technologies as an Artist-in- Residence at the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Brussels. All of her varied pursuits remain informed by overwhelmingly wide-ranging subject matter—from theory and thermodynamics to the materiality of plastic and the representation of women in pre-1960s soft core pornography. Arrays, ciphers, databases, equations, files, lexicons, logs, schematics and systems. Machines, mandalas, manuscripts and “mind maps.”
An eponymous 108-page publication will be available as a companion to the exhibition. Edited by Julie Peeters, co-published by Roma Publications and Kunstverein München, the book collates a rich array of rare archival material and new primary information in a parallel space for Van Kerckhoven’s more textual, graphic, and documentary approaches.
Altogether, ‚Serving Compressed Energy with Vacuum’ is an X-ray of an artist’s practice-presented in the artist’s own words, mediated in its own dialect.
