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Sideshow, 2019
HD-projection (16:9), stop motion photography, colour, silent
Duration: 39', in loop
With: Aneleen Keppens, Kayoko Minami, Gustavo Miranda,
Jurgen Persijn, Jaklien Torfs-Onzia

A series of disguised figures, including a geisha, a clown, a mummy, bird people and a cat woman, appear and disappear against an abstract background with multicoloured light, in an endless dance reminiscent of the medieval Dance of the Death. With these images, recorded in stop motion with various performers, the artist returns to a few of her old favourite genres: theatre, silent films, masquerades, puppet theatre, circus, and cabaret.

There is something uncanny about the noiselessness of movements depicted in stop-motion films. They do not disguise the illusion of animation. They are ostentatiously jerky, at once frozen and mobile, dead and alive, speaking and mute. The performers’ broken movements give them something wooden, as if they have become puppets. Their never-ending parade is at once macabre, moving, terrifying and comical. One of the inspirations for the performers’ slow, swaying movements was butoh dance, also known as the Japanese Dance of Death and Disease.


go to When You Whistle, It Makes Air Come Out, 2019