Edith Dekyndt

Specific Subjects, Edith Dekyndt’s project for Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence, weaves together new and evolving technologies, ancestral knowledge and contemporary issues.

Some of the works challenge the decomposition of matter, allowing us to sketch out an atmosphere between brutality and fragility, problematising the presence of these two antagonistic notions in the same place. The exhibition at Saint-Paul-de-Vence is both a journey through Dekyndt’s artistic universe, where the dialogue between nature and culture intertwines with the land, and an experience that transcends the usual spaces of art. As visitors, she invites us to explore multiple levels of meaning and to question our understanding of space, memory and temporality.

In the current context, marked by conflicts and radical transformations in the way we live and act, with economic, material, immaterial and emotional repercussions, the artist proposes a series of works in which the dynamic between nature and culture, the rural and the urban, generates new paradigms that must be confronted.

The title of the exhibition, Specific Subjects, is a reference to Donald Judd’s influential manifesto, “Specific Objects “¹, published in 1964. Although her artistic practice, developed since the 1990s, is characterised by a sober language and an intensely evocative materiality, Dekyndt deliberately moves away from a more hermetic minimalism, calling out and evoking ‘subjects’ rather than ‘objects’.

By fusing conceptual, scientific and experimental approaches, the artist deconstructs the signs of her creative process. She archives, collects and catalogues images, sounds and objects using a rigorous methodology, manifesting a symptomatic reality through her work.

Exploring the spaces in which knowledge is formed and the limits of its confinement, her practice adopts a critical and speculative perspective, establishing the conditions necessary to bear witness to a social and political reality. Revealing an attraction to the elusive and intangible, his work draws on signs of impermanence, while evoking the imprint left by history on the surface of things, architecture and public spaces. This approach underlines the urgent need to question writing and historical narratives.

María Inés Rodríguez, Curator of the exhibition

^1. Specific Objects, published in 1965 in Arts Yearbook 8.