Representing the Body as Space, Tool, and Material: Danny Devos about his Art
On Sunday, the 18th of February, West will host a special event around the work of artist Danny Devos, on the occasion of ALLES=GOED, the one-year exhibition of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven. The afternoon will be in English and moderated by Ory Dessau.
Danny Devos (born 1959 in Vilvoorde, lives and works in Antwerp) is a prolific body and performance artist. A one-man movement his portfolio consists of 174 performances carried out in more than forty cities worldwide, amounting to a profound, existential elaboration on the human condition of the individual in current times of accelerated systemization.
The afternoon will revolve around Devos’ childhood in the industrial suburbs of Vilvoorde, his affiliation to the No Future movement, his first steps as a body and performance artist in a cultural climate devoid of any awareness to these forms of art, and his encounter with Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven leading in 1981 to the founding of the autarkic art enterprise known as Club Moral, which served as a collaborative multi-disciplinary creative platform oscillating between the institutional art world and the underground scene in Belgium and beyond.
During the afternoon Devos will share the concepts and motivations informing his practice, as well as his perceptions with regard to the performative document and the ways in which his art is being registered, which brought him in recent years to remake his performances by means of encapsulated 3D models. The meeting will focus also on Devos’ cultural and historical references. It will include an in-depth interview and film excerpts presenting documentations of the artist’s performances and exhibitions, as well as movies reflecting his fields of interest and research.