Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) is an artist of singular complexity. Born in 1951 in Antwerp, where she still lives and works, she has been active since the 1970s as a visual artist, graphic designer and performer. She has always been a pioneer. She should, first and foremost, be considered an artist for the future. AMVK’s practice is truly interdisciplinary.

M HKA wants to introduce Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven to a wider audience as an innovator of forms and interpreter of moods - as oxygen of the whole society.

AMVK: Installations

(c)image: AMVK
Industriële Typen, 1982
Installation

"I made an attempt to the forming of ideas, through he abstract feeling around words and images, their outward forms, their meanings, their sound.

Subtle disorientation. The stream of ideas, images and associations an entertainment for the spectator. No truth, but an on the spot confirmed short remaining conclusion. Without pretensions, logical undisentanglable, but correct. On the floor lay 5 sheets of brown mousse (unstability/porous), and 5 plexi mirrors (narcism/own-importance). On calf-height a steel cable is stretched, it divides the room in 5 equal fields (boobytraps/primary importance of the individual/loss of hold).

The upper body is made out of 5 half-perished and folded pieces of grey mousse and plastic nailed in the walls each with 5 big steel nails. Each combination carries the numbering and précising of the elements of the number for which they stand (introspection/ groping/ summing up). Above head-height hang 5 combinations of 5 plexi-works in different colours, form and thickness. They each stand as a symbol for the word to which they refer. A+ B + C each time give a new a butt that leads to an (although short) order. (touchable proofs/reach over).

The whole is a result of a study of information through all well or not specialised magazines of the last 50 years.


1. whale oil -> source light -> kerosene - special skills - industry
2. development. expansion. services - research organisation
3. substitutes. industrial location affected - economy
4. tax variations. regional. national - intervention
5. capacity. location. socio-economic - challenge


As much superfluous, but relatively correct as the psychological types of Jung, I could establish 5 leading entities in our surrounding:
1. Man or the male factor in all acts.
2. Woman or the female factor in all acts.
3. Pronouncements the dissecting, associative, connecting factor.
4. Purpose which seems to be only a means.
5. Order from where the cycle starts again, always changed and refilled.

The whole always has to lead to the feeling ‘Away All Ground Under the Feet’ so that predictableness makes room for pure evolution.

As a sound-supply I made with DDV a loop-cassette on which pinched words ‘I like it in here’ and irregular tones absorbing the individual in the space.

For this exhibition a cassette + poster + plexi-multiple was edited."

− AMVK