Location: Kloosterlaan 138, 4811 EE Breda (NL)
Crawling so close into the thing that you can’t see it anymore
Bie Michels’ work is about the relationship between the subject and the object. While making, she is intensely drawn to the depth of the thoughts that the making arouses. My conversation with her did not start somewhere at the beginning, but in the middle, with hands in her hair, with papers written out on the table between us. From that indeterminate point, we wandered through all kinds of reservations and caveats, searching for the main lines of her work and for the most accurate formulations regarding the relationship between the soul and things. Michels is fascinated by the status of the loose entities that surround us. By our possessions, by what we call our properties, and especially by what those things may have to say, and by their status, whether or not they are true. Are they ’true’ or are they appearances?
Michels’ new films Time in a gaze/Words about (dis)appearing things each symbolize from a different experience of time what her entire quest is about: the disappearance and appearance of the thing, and the value of something or someone who only becomes clear when he/she/it is no longer there. The jug serves as an absolute symbol for ’the thing’ and also refers to the human because of its shape. The bubble symbolizes the temporality of all structures (thing, people, association of people, society), which Michels got from Peter Sloterdijk.
Curator Frederik Vergaert
Entire text of Griet Menschaert (in Dutch), Article in HART (in Dutch)
Photos Bie Michels