Anouk De Clercq
Echo

In recent years, Anouk De Clercq has gained significant attention through a series of animated films in which she explores the ideal combination of content, technology, and formal aesthetics. Playing with tempo, atmosphere, composition, and perspective, she consistently manages to create highly surprising visual experiences. While rethinking her visual language for each work, the pieces resonate with each other in some way.

Anouk De Clercq’s work is realized through computer programs. The continuous evolution of informatics provides ever-new and improved possibilities in creating animated films. Remarkably, unlike many contemporaries employing digital techniques, the visual language of Anouk De Clercq continues to function even years after its creation. This timelessness is achieved, in part, because the work remains highly accessible to the viewer, effortlessly transporting them into a world that combines the familiar and the unknown.

Crucial to her practice is collaboration with artists from various disciplines, such as composers of digital music, architects, and visual artists. Through such collaboration, the artist is compelled to incorporate different influences, enriching and layering the work.

In 2005, Anouk De Clercq presented the film Building (2003) at MDD. For this work, she started with a concrete 3D model of the new Concertgebouw in Bruges. Walls were removed from this model to create more freedom of movement, leaving only the least supportive elements: the openings through which light enters. The rhythm in the building by Robbrecht and Daem is echoed in the editing through the constant shifting light and Anton Aeki’s music, a fundamental component of Building.

For her current project at MDD, Anouk De Clercq created Echo, a continuation of the research initiated in Building and Pang: infiltrating and transforming an existing space and spatially translating a mental process, respectively. She collaborated once again with sound artist Anton Aeki.

Anouk De Clercq utilizes elements of the museum space to make her work function as an echo or resonance within that same space. The two-dimensional projection surface becomes an entry point to a new mental space. Her work becomes a landscape that physically and mentally transports the spectator.