About

Edith Dekyndt

Edith Dekyndt is not a videographer,
Edith Dekyndt is a video director. It is her medium of choice to translate fleetingness and the ephemeral. She herself is in constant movement, a nomad hopping between Tournai, her hometown, Strasbourg, her workplace where she teaches, New York, Brussels, Berlin, Winnipeg, Mexico or Utrecht, locations where she wanders, exhibits, experiments. A true creative, she experiments, seeks, and tries it all over again. An internationally acclaimed artist, illustrator and sculptor, five of her works can now be found in the MOMA's collection. Her output over the last fifteen years is prolific and impressive. Highlights include the Worthlessness (1997) series of videos who showcase the convolution of a plastic bag, Star System (2001), a video that lasts as long as a Polaroid picture developing, the video installation Alone at home (2001), which adapts the light effects of a TV-set, as well as Program for a cold place (2000), a video that captures the explosion of a glass milk bottle in freezing temperatures (-40°C).

Medias

The exhibition

Provisory object 03

Provisory object 03 is a 3'31" colour video without any soundtrack. A sequence shot is zoomed in on two black hands. The right hand's thumb and index fingers form a closed circle in which a film of soap water whirls. The water moves at different speeds, the rhythm fluctuates, the colours of the shimmer vary; the effect of the turbulence is so surprising that some have wondered whether it was authentic or not. Such as American audiences who, fed with continuous media exaggeration, simply assumed it was a computer-generated image. The contrast is even greater when one knows that in Kinshasa, the soap bubble is seen
as a jewel, a treasure in a protective case,
a metaphor of fragile beauty.

Medias