Hedwig Houben
Hedwig Houben
b. 1983 in Boxtel, The Netherlands; based in Brussels
www.hedwighouben.nl (link transfers to PDF file)
Works in the exhibition
The Good, the Bad, the Happy, the Sad, 2014
Video of lecture/performance, 19 min. 33 sec.
Video by Bas Schevers
Installed on the ground floor at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art
The Hand, the Eye and It, 2013
Video of lecture/performance, 20 min. 11 sec.
Video by Bas Schevers
Installed on the second floor at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art
See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157656453789150
While strategically employing a style of expression that incorporates lecture and performance, Hedwig Houben transforms the process of deconstructing (particularly sculptural) artistic conventions (subject and object, the artist and the creative process, discussion of works of art, and the viewer’s gaze), and the relationships among them, into art in its own right. Houben’s lecture/performance The Hand, the Eye, and It (2013), presented at Parasophia, assigns a clay model of the artist’s own hand the role of intermediating among, and interrelating, various elements: the indeterminate, proto-sculptural object “It,” the artist, her gaze and hands, and a spoken explanation of the work. Her most recent piece, The Good, the Bad, the Happy, the Sad (2014), is a video in which two clay sculptures in progress, designated as Good and Bad, are placed on a living room carpet and converse with one another, mediated by the artist. The witty, psychoanalytically informed repartee between the two sculptures, whose opinions clash, offers an incisive analysis of the relationships among the autonomy of works of art, the works themselves, the artist, and the viewer.
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Hedwig Houben, The Hand, the Eye and It, 2013. Installation view at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Photo by Norimasa Kawata
