It was an interesting programming decision, and really, the contrast could not have been more pronounced. While Witte de With’s entire top floor had been converted into a vast symposium space, complete with sound baffles and live video feeds, for its three-day talkfest The Curators, involving over forty of the world’s most visible exhibition makers—and, no doubt, quite a few attendant egos—the gallery spaces below were a model of understatement and restraint. Where The Curators seemed culturally and intellectually loaded, its program and audiences heavily packed and invested with a real sense of urgency, Edith Dekyndt’s ‘Agnosia’ maintained a quiet dignity, unwilling to announce itself as anything other than what it was, only ever hinting at how rewarding time spent with it might be.
‘Agnosia’ brought together twelve new and adapted video, photographic, sculptural and sound works that the Belgian artist has proposed as ‘neither spectacular nor consumable’. Typically, Dekyndt holds back on unnecessary visual information and restricts her pallet to cooler tones that usually border on grey. Her videos usually consist of single-channel static shots of an anchored but unstable form with little other contextualising information. Their close referencing of video’s formal and technical relationship to photography is reciprocated through the artist’s photographic works, which, through their simultaneous presentation of only slightly varied forms, could be mistaken for frames from an experimental film. Indeed, experimental film and various manifestations of expanded cinema seem to be as important to Dekyndt’s practice as the more recognisable formal rigour of minimalism and its offshoots. As cool and reductive as her work might appear, it belies a fascination for the illusory qualities of light, its capacity to build perceptual and experiential structures