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.

Verdeel en Heers

(c)image: AMVK
17 November - 22 December 1989
ICC, Antwerpen

"My starting-point for the installation “The 5th Force” was the making of a cult-room in which various and supplementary moral survival systems exist simultaneously. The presence is continuous and complete, so that anytime one enters the space, an ethical overall picture is impressed, a picture of what defines us Westerners, wittingly or unwittingly, in most of our behavior and rational development.

The information-currents happen in certain rhythms and contain atheist as well as religious ideologies, rosicrucians, black magic, freemasons, information-cults, evolutionary cults, pagan incantations, popular culture, artificial intelligence.

I call it a mystic work because my main motive is the liquidation of adversary, the re-unification of what was torn apart in the beginning of mankind. 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 halves of the brain, 2 hands, 2 feet. One always needs 2 to experience depth, to enter anything profoundly, including consciousness.

The pain which removes the Self from oneself is called consciousness.

By showing all this together I try to liquidate these divisions which refrain us to exceed certain limits. More specific the limits which refrain us from feeling the unity with all that’s been created.

This is a work in progress, in other words, this work evolves every time it is shown, it is refined, replenished and amplified, it becomes clearer and completer.  I see this work as a melting pot of all elements I’ve been working with in the past 20 years."

− AMVK