More than ‘Performan’: Danny Devos’s multifaceted career

Danny Devos (°1959, Vilvoorde) is considered to be one of the pioneers of Belgian performance art. Between 1979 and 2025, he gave an impressive 176 performances, regularly seeking the limits of his body by making cuts in his chest with a razor blade, for example, or repeatedly throwing himself down a flight of stairs. Furthermore, his performances often function as a critical tool to expose power relationships within the art world and highlight the precarious position of the artist. Incidentally, Devos’ engagement also manifests itself at policy level. Working with the lawyer and former politician Yasmine Kherbache, among others, he played a key role within the advocacy organisation NICC in the creation of the artist’s status in Belgium. Devos also set up the performance band Club Moral with his wife, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, in 1981. The duo organised countless exhibitions, concerts, lectures, film screenings and performances by other artists under that name, as well as publishing a total of fifteen issues of the magazine Force Mental.

When Devos gave his first performance, Installation – 1 (1979) during a party at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent in 1979, the discipline was still in its infancy at institutional level in Belgium. So the artist’s confrontational action didn’t go down particularly well, as we see from a letter from Wim Van Mulders to Devos a few weeks later. However, Devos soon connected with like minds in Belgium and abroad in that period, with whom he regularly corresponded and exchanged material. Even today, he continues to choose physically intense actions that deliberately embrace discomfort, resistance and confrontation. However, Devos distances himself from any form of the self-mythologising he sees in some performance artists, where the artist’s image becomes more important than the act itself.

In parallel to his performances, Devos has developed a sculptural practice based mainly on a profound fascination with serial killers. In almost clinically composed installations, he evokes both the psychological complexity of violence and deviant behaviour and society’s fascination with it. In many of these works, Devos applies archival organising principles, in which the classification and ordering of images and other material is not merely a method but a conscious artistic strategy to generate meaning. Things that are shocking at first glance stimulate Devos to reflect on ethical boundaries, our cultural interaction with violence, etc., and also on the parallels between the artist’s creative process and the serial killer’s modus operandi. This interest dates back to Devos’ youth and the media culture of the 1960s, when the murder of John F. Kennedy and the images of Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest made a profound impression on him.

Moreover, Devos has always had a sharp eye for the possibilities of new media and the internet. His blog posts stand as autonomous works of art, and in recent years he has also been exploring the possibilities of artificial intelligence and 3D printing. The websites he has made for himself, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Club Moral go far further than a standard artist’s web page. The sites effectively function as publicly accessible, relational databases in which a range of documents such as images, bibliographies and even full 3D renders of exhibitions are interconnected. Likewise, Devos publishes some of his artistic activities on the social media platform Instagram, using documents from his archive. Behind the screens, he has also developed a collection inventory system for both himself and for Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.

Danny Devos is a figure who has had an undisputed influence on various aspects of the visual arts scene since the 1980s. His archive reflects the multidisciplinary nature of his artistic activities, making it relevant to a range of domains, from performance art, music and visual art to questions surrounding policy and the functioning of artist-run organisations. Furthermore, Devos’ long-standing fascination with serial killers has led him systematically to collect large quantities of documentary material on these figures. As such, his archive also appeals to interests outside art history, such as criminology, media studies and cultural history. Neither can Devos’ archive be understood separately from that of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, with whom he has worked for more than four decades, building up a shared ecosystem of projects and digital infrastructures.

In the pilot project focusing on artists’ archives since the 1970s, the CKV has already surveyed the structure of Devos’ archive by means of an archive description. In addition, an extensive interview has been held with the artist, in which Devos looks back on his career and reflects on possible strategies for preserving and opening up his archive, and access to it in the future. He explicitly emphasises the importance of keeping the various layers and subdivisions of his archive together here – from the collaboration with Van Kerckhoven and Club Moral to the documentary material on serial killers – because he believes that hybridity itself is essential to a continued understanding of the full complexity of his practice.

Read the interview here.