RhoK show

I had already mentioned the pleasant presentation surprise in the circuit of the showcase circuit in Liège, where I found some sumptuous works of Vered Ben-Kiki in a fitting (if it had not been for roadworks) setting – but now we were treated to two presentations in which one could get up close and personal to her work...

At the R.Ho.K. In Brussels in two of their buildings: Etterbeek and Woluwe. Upon entering the somewhat brutish 70's pavilion in Etterbeek one could only not that it fit – Vered Ben-Kiki's works fit the space well, being of large human dimensions, from detail to arms-length, in a space that has a strong presence of it's own but caters well to the multi-level view from different aspects: The notion that there is not only one reading of the work, or better said, avoiding a single interpretation and always leaning towards another... Encompassing various points of view without becoming muddled or obtuse, Vered manages to keep complacency at bay and remind us that it could be either this way or that, equally valid.

Born and raised in Haifa, where she studied philosophy to begin with, she opted for the art academy in Antwerp as a next step rather than one of the ivy-league universities in the States she was originally planning to use her scholarship for... Already influenced by the interaction of languages, in her care Hebrew, English and some Arabic, the immersion into another split culture such as Belgium, with its French and Flemish interactions (...being married to the French-speaking artist Serge De Taeye in a Flemish-speaking town) must have been an interesting challenge. One that perhaps led her to re-visit her first school exercise books in which the basics, vowels consonants, word fragments and short phrases and visual transcription – illustrative drawings – mingle to form a kaleidoscopic world which is then ordered into lists, groups, schemes, categories and sorts...

This ordering however, is essentially arbitrary... we use it for practical purposes, but are not sure if we can trust it: Vered Ben-Kiki questioned the didactic order from an early age – her critical slant led her to investigate why something could not be such, or thus, or perhaps even something else entirely... Simple concepts of, 'here', 'there', 'yesterday' 'now' are redistributed in an unstable landscape in which the search for the truth become philosophical: 'Now is already gone...' friend an fellow 50/50er Wout Vercammen liked to propose... But here one must also hark back to Vered's study of Wittgenstein, and his own multifarious views on 'ordinary language' in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophico' and then the later 'Über Gewißheit' in which a hand might be resting on a table or....

What at first glance is 'absurdist' (not to say surreal) playfulness clothed in a sort of comic-strip format or table of consonants, vocabulary lists, abstract formula's, rules and exceptions – imagery of simple day-tot-day objects that begin to waver by nature of their representation, their identification and/or their juxtaposition with others and the relations formed... Tough at first glance I can not perceive a direct link to any specific theorem (which I imagine was also to be avoided at all cost) I do suspect that a reading of (for instance) E. Gellner's 'Words and Things, an examination, and an attack on Liguisic Philosophy' would open up various new avenues in which to view this work.

The show is in two locations, quite different but at the same time fitting for this endeavor to show different aspects of Vered Ben-Kiki's work years after it had been rolled up an put away... She herself did not show any more for quite a while, having taken up other projects, one quite closely related, being children's books, in which her work reverberates, and music, where the graphics of her productions are also apparent... In both of R.Ho.K.'s spaces there is a selection of works from divers periods and styles – which make both sites interesting to visit, and personally I find taking a bit of time to consider the works is essential... at this point there are no extensive texts or references to aid the viewer, but that is also a good thing: to view the work unfettered by theory is to enjoy it in it's most pure and playful – no doubt there will be quite a bit said and discussed afterwards... and that is the point: to begin to (re-)consider her work after so many years of absence.

 

here Vered at the bookstand of Gruzemayer during HAB with one of her first books