Force Archival: The career and archive of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (°1951, Antwerp) is one of the most important Belgian artists alive today. With solo exhibitions at leading institutions such as the Kunsthalle Bern (2005), The Renaissance Society (2011), Kunstverein München (2015), Museum Abteiberg (2016) and Museum Fridericianum (2018), she has also reached an international audience in recent years with her multifaceted artistic practice, which includes drawings, videos, works with plastic and experiments with computer animations and artificial intelligence.  In the context of the pilot project on artists’ archives from 1970 onwards, the CKV approached Van Kerckhoven with a double goal: firstly, to map the structure of her extensive archive for the first time and to gain insight into her needs and visions for the archive, and secondly to document her artistic career in an extensive interview, with special attention to her exhibition history.

Van Kerckhoven’s first exhibitions were held in informal, often not very professional contexts. Her work was regularly experienced as confrontational in this period, even by her own friends and family. For example, her parents apparently came home in tears after seeing her first exhibition in 1975, presented with the ceramicist Coco Kemper, (°1943, Heemstede) at Galerij Stijn in Hoboken.  Since the late seventies and early eighties, Van Kerckhoven has regularly exhibited in alternative art spaces in the Netherlands, Germany and even the United States: places focusing on experimentation and interdisciplinarity. Over the course of the 1980s, institutional interest in her work gradually grew, leading among other things to solo exhibitions at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp (1982, 1985, 1989) and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent (1986), as well as participation in the group exhibition Confrontatie-Confrontaties (1988) at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, also in Ghent. Van Kerckhoven had a complex relationship with Jan Hoet, the omnipresent curator of the museum in Ghent. Her exhibitions in the wider circle of exhibitions surrounding Hoet reveal a cycle of recognition and rejection, with recurrent disputes over selection criteria and, especially, the artistic merit of her work. A prime example is Van Kerckhoven’s selection for Ponton Temse (1990), an exhibition curated by Jan Hoet that is generally considered to have been a try-out for documenta IX (1992), curated by Hoet, for which she was ultimately not selected. Eventually, Van Kerckhoven’s consistent and multi-faceted practice resulted in broadly based institutional recognition at national level, including solo exhibitions at M HKA (1999), S.M.A.K. (2000), WIELS (2008), Mu.ZEE (2012) and again at M HKA (2018).

Van Kerckhoven’s archive is not a static unit; it forms an integral part of her artistic practice. Her studios function within this practice as workshops in which production, conservation and reflection coincide. At the same time, the archive plays an active role in Van Kerckhoven’s way of working: it both documents the past and acts as source material for new artistic interventions. This is exemplified by the extensive collection of images of women that the artist has collected through the years and systematically reuses in series where she recontextualises visual stereotypes by confronting them with text material from an extremely wide range of theoretical contexts.

The structure of this archive follows a largely visual and associative logic of its own that makes perfect sense to Van Kerckhoven but is not immediately obvious to outsiders. Van Kerckhoven indicates that her artistic practice is only partially captured by the structures she has created in the archive and database, which is why she believes there is an important role for researchers to make new connections based on this material and to open up her practice further.

The development of her digital archive, particularly from the early 2000s onwards, introduced new forms of ordering, often in dialogue with systems set up by others. This also applies to the contribution of her husband and artistic partner Danny Devos, with whom she founded Club Moral. His database logic is different to her own more intuitive and visual approach, but it also contributes to the long-term accessibility of her work. Although Van Kerckhoven consistently regards her artistic practice as autonomous, she acknowledges that her archive has become inextricably intertwined with Devos’ own over the course of time. When considering her legacy, the key issue for her is therefore how this complex ensemble can remain workable and accessible in the future, without losing sight of the specific identity of her practice – a sensitivity that is partly rooted in the gender relationships in the art scene where her work emerged.

Read the full interview here.