Alex Verhaest
Hours and dates
- Oct 28 from 14:20 to 15:00
The place
Theater - TRAKK Room
Language
English
Sponsored by
AboutAlex Verhaest
Alex Verhaest studied in Brussels at Luca School of arts, where she is a guest professor since 2015. She was part of the new media arts collective ‘Platform for urban investigations’ with whom she participated in group-shows at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven and the Museo de Arte Moderna in Salvador da Bahia. In 2009 she decided to focus more on her own practice and to leave the collective. Her work has since been exhibited at numerous institutions amongst which ZKM in karlruhe, HKW in Berlin, and Bozar Brussels. Her installations have been collected by MMCA Busan and are part of the Akzo Nobel collection. She won the New Face Award at the Japan Media arts Festival and her work has been awarded with the prestigious 2015 Ars Electronica Golden Nica. In 2019 she graduated valedictorian from Le Fresnoy, studio national.
Verhaest’s work operates on the juxtaposition of animation, videogame and cinema expanded. With each new film, Verhaest dives into what it means to make films in a multi-screen post-Nintendo society.
ConferencesThinking like strangers
In March 2020, the world came to a screeching halt. We were forced to pause, look around us and reconsider: where exactly were we heading? What were we looking for?
A flurry of articles appeared about aspirational new world views. And depending on the type of Facebook friends you had, the alternatives presented were either dire or hopeful. Some wanted to go back to the Arcadian cliché of the suburbia of the fifties, while others pined for the now closed hedonist hub of the city. “Like” or “don’t like”, there was only one certainty; Change was coming, for better or worse.
How to think about Utopia? How to think about Dystopia? Where do our ideas about this come from? How had people thought about Utopia before this apparent apocalypse? Are we ever right?
In Eutopia Unbound, Sofie Verraest describes how the idea of “a good place” and the description of it within famous, infamous or even less read books, ensures that stereotypical patterns of the imagination are activated. Those patterns circulate in a culture and are perpetuated through movies and art and plays and music that move us and annoy us and thus those patterns sneakily nestle themselves deeply into our collective subconscious. The things we keep and collect in a culture are the means by which we shape our past, future and present, for better or for worse. These artefacts shape the framework by which we define our likes and dislikes around a more complex reality. They shape the lens through which we see the state of the world. The talk will investigate how Sofie Verraest’s Doctoral thesis Eutopia Unbound formed the basis for my video game ad hominem.
Thanks to the support of the European funds FEDER, this conference is exceptionally proposed to you free of charge by making the request at the reception of the festival, located at the entrance of the Marquee.
