Gender and art

Under the title Echolalia Ana Torfs is showing for the first time in her Brussels base a broad selection of the work that she has been developing since the early 1990s. This exhibition offers an exhaustive survey of her works from the last five years, which until now had mostly been shown abroad, and sometimes had been executed for specific contexts. What’s more, with the installation The Parrot & the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria, WIELS is presenting a world première.

Torfs always starts from existing texts and images, whether it is the classic Rossellini film Journey to Italy, the nomenclature of flowers and plants or the travel journals of Christopher Columbus. Moreover, the range of reproducible media to which she has recourse, going all the way from sound, video, photographs and slide projections to prints, silkscreens and tapestries, is remarkably broad. In the end we only hear echoes of the original source: playful transpositions and translations from language to image and vice versa, rendering displacements of meaning and interpretation.

Ana Torfs - Echolalia

12.09 - 14.12.2014

WIELS, Brussels

http://www.wiels.org/en/

Ana Torfs, "The Parrot & the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria", 2014.

“Echolalia” is the repetition of words by a child when it learns how to talk, but it also refers to a medical condition that makes someone compulsively repeat words and sentences. Under this equivocal title Belgian artist Ana Torfs offers a survey of her most recent body of work in six various installations, all of which resonate with one another. [...]

The interplay between language and representation plays a central role in Ana Torfs’ work, and with it the related processes of translation and visualisation. Found texts and images often constitute the main components of her practice.

Ana Torfs - Echolalia

12.09 – 14.12.2014

WIELS, Brussels

Ana Torfs, The Parrot & the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria, 2014.

Under the title Echolalia, Ana Torfs assembles a broad selection of the work that she has been developing since the early 1990s and shows now for the first time in her Brussels hometown. The exhibition offers a particularly exhaustive survey of her works from the last five years, which had mostly only been shown abroad, or had first been presented in a specific context—such as the former coal mine in Waterschei or the trading port in Sharjah. Echolalia also includes the major new installation, The Parrot & the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria, which premieres at WIELS.

Ana Torfs : Echolalia

12 September - 14 December 2014

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels

http://www.wiels.org/en/1/