Artist talks

​University of South Australia

Deirdre Feeney is a cross-disciplinary artist and lecturer of Contemporary Art at The University of South Australia. Her research interests include the materiality of image making, media archaeology and the history of optics. Deirdre’s practice-led research collaborates across disciplines of optics and engineering to develop optical image systems. Her creative works are hybrid systems incorporating old and new technologies and technological ideas, from Renaissance natural magic to nineteenth-century optical mechanics; and are made using digital fabrication and traditional making skills. With a background in glass-making and the projected moving image, Deirdre uses materials such as glass and mirrors to develop image systems that physically and emotionally engage the viewer.

​Artist & researcher

Doina Kraal (1980, NL) is an Amsterdam-based artist. She studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (BA) and at Central Saint Martins in London (MA). Doina was a PhD candidate at PhDArts, Leiden University.

​Inspired by the historical rarekiek she makes life-size peepshow boxes. Through her multimedia installations and performances, she investigates how a sensory and enchanting encounter can be established between the triangle observer, performer and artistic object.

Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Foam, Amsterdam and Marres, Maastricht (the Netherlands); National Gallery, Mumbai (India); Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (Brazil).

​Artist & Sint Lucas Antwerpen

Drawings, sculptures and installations by the Belgian artist Wesley Meuris (*1977) present a strongly architectural, or even scientific, character. Things which could, at first glance, appear as devices for presenting works or other artefacts, are, in fact, works of art in themselves. By bringing these mechanisms and demonstration objects to light, Wesley Meuris points at our way of presenting and seeing things. By exhibiting, for example, animal cages left empty or a theme park kiosk, inanimate and reduced to its simplest apparatus, he hopes to show us things which usually escape our view but which, nonetheless, play a primordial role in our daily interpretation of the world which surrounds us. His sculptures and installations are often accompanied by drawings and analytical schemas which strengthen the functional character of these subjects.

​Artist-researcher & Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA), University of Antwerp

Sarah Vanhee is an internationally renowned artist, performer and author, whose work has been shown in major performing arts contexts for the past fifteen years, as well as in the visual arts, film and literature. Vanhee is known for her transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral work and for inventing original art forms, mostly in a dilettante manner. Her art is driven by radical imagination, leading to the creation of new fictions, or the realization of radical interventions in reality. Art is an instrument for her to foreground underexposed narratives and non-dominant voices. Vanhee travels in between private and public space, and the institutional art field. 

In September 2022 she receive a PhD in the Arts from the University of Antwerp (ARIA) and the Antwerp Royal Conservatoire for her project bodies of knowledge - How to claim public space as a platform for the exchange of non-dominant or suppressed knowledge. Read more on her project in her FORUM+ article "listening to listening | listening letter".

​KASK & Conservatorium School of Arts Ghent

Hannes Verhoustraete is a filmmaker and artistic researcher at KASK School of Arts. His PhD-project focusses on the essay. In the framework of his PhD research and the B-magic project, he developed Vue Brisée, an essay film on the colonial gaze and the magic lantern. He is also an editor of the online film magazine Sabzian.be.