Press Release

“We in reality know nothing firmly but only as it changes in accordance with the condition of the body and of the things which enter it and of the things which resist it. (….) in reality we do not know how each thing is or is not has been shown in many ways.”  Democritus

The origin of the exhibition “Chronology of Tears” lies in the experience of twilight and claire-obscure, a historical technique in painting and a certain intensity of light in winter, when the artist prepared this exhibition.

A first piece at the entrance of the space refers to two previous works. The slide series Static Light (2004) reveals the electromagnetic light sparks that are set off during a swift manipulation and friction of a woollen blanket in a dark space. The sound of this static electricity is experienced when watching the Static Sound video (2004). Both recordings took place in a mountainous area at a temperature of -35°C.

Exactly ten years later the artist decided to repeat the experiment under similar meteorological conditions, i.e. at a temperature of -15°C, in the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The blanket that was used in these recordings was subsequently covered on one side in small thin copper sheets.

The essence of this action is the charging, the activation of matter. This reflection frames the action in the materialist philosophical tradition, with footnotes of Spinoza’s animism, Deleuze and Guattari’s vitalism and the recent work by Jane Bennett. All matter has an active, process-determined action that presumes a continuous movement, a transformation, even it remains invisible.

Edith Dekyndt’s work also confronts us with the insufficiency of our visual perception and demands a wider experience that includes emotion, intuition and imagination. This imagination component in the structure of meaning may be related to certain conceptual strategies in which a work of art completes itself in the experience and the thoughts of the viewer.