Edith Dekyndt
Get Out of My Cloud

Edith Dekyndt (b. Ypres, 1960) lives and works in Tournai. In visual and sound works, installations and sculptural objects, she explores physical phenomena such as sound waves and light, works with invisible elements, including dust and magnetic particles, and records ephemeral events. Employing a minimal, aesthetic visual language, she traces these back into almost metaphysical, autonomous compositions. Since 1999, Dekyndt has referred to her conceptual search for what is barely visible as Universal Research of Subjectivity. This title betrays the fact that her work envisions a poetic, more than a scientific registration. Her oeuvre of physical investigations opens new dimensions of sensual illusion, despite their empirical capture and physical, real representation. Seemingly dead objects are observed from microscopic distances and seem to come to life in an intensified reality.

In her new work, created for KIOSK’s hemicycle space, Edith Dekyndt has employed that same subjective, investigative methodology. The images, text and sound of her Carousel installation centre on a Kodak Carousel slide projector: it projects a series of 80 glass slide mounts produced in Germany in the 1960s, and which remained unopened ever since. In other words, the projections reveal the spatial and temporary capture of light and dust preserved over a period of 50 years. At the same time, on a monitor, we see a quote from the cult series, Mad Men, in which protagonist Don Draper goes in search of the idea that was at the heart of the invention of the Kodak Carousel projector. He becomes overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia, a perception that is equally tangible in the presentation of this work. Although the typical holiday snapshots in the slide show have been replaced here by images defined by dust, cracking, dried-out surface accumulation, and so on., the idea of ‘the wheel’ of the Carousel as a time capsule remains intact.

How the work came about is unmistakably visible in the final result. The installation takes shape through Edith Dekyndt’s minimal, subtle intervention: her discovery, unpacking and presenting of the old slide mounts. The aspects of coincidence, accident and failure creep into the work. This is not about a definitive image, but about the intermediary state of the material. When the time capsule was opened, it was automatically exposed to time and wear, creating a new metamorphosis. The enlargement of the process is a means of giving form to time standing still, to its pure causality, which is so difficult for us to comprehend. This work consequently incorporates an analysis and an interrogation of such a universal phenomenon as time and its intrinsically self-evident character. We are surrounded by ubiquitous phenomena – emptiness, absorption and time – that have a determining effect on our personal existence, but we fail to notice them in their ubiquity. By exposing this, Edith Dekyndt sharpens our sense of perception.

Dekyndt’s installation adds a new dimension to our concept of time, which is represented at two levels: that of the ‘slides’ themselves, which remained untouched for so long, so that time had literally burnt itself into them, and at the level of the installation, which itself gives form to the phenomenon of the recurring ‘loop’ of time. Because of the mechanical clicking of the projector, a continuous rhythm rings through the space, a symbol of how time moves back and forth. The dust particles – captured in time and space – are now essentially spotlighted in the space, a still life of dust. The carousel projector gives us a microscopic analysis of time.

exhibition text / press release