17.04.09 - 16.05.09

Michèle Matyn

“Boterknieën” (“Butterknees”) is the title of Michèle Matyn’s (BE) coming exhibition, that will be opened on the 17th of april at The Hague artist-run space 1646. The exhibition will include several large foto prints and Matyn’s new installation, which will be completed during the opening, through an intervention by the international performance collective bissy bunder, which Matyn is part of.

The way the artist deals with mysterious places, found on solitary trips through desolated locations around the world is one of Matyn’s bigest fascinations and the starting point of her works.

Michèle Matyn’s background is photography, a medium she uses in her trips to encounter the unknown, the stranger. But Matyn doesn’t position herself in the role of an observer, but she involves her own person to create the image. The interaction or her participation is so important, that her photography can be described as the result of an action or performance rather than a documentary reflex.

Matyn makes images that tell us something about codes; the system of values and habits of a person or a group. Sometimes it results in a portrait in the traditional sense of the word, but often her photos show constellations of lifeless things. Weird constructions, foto-albums, collections, interiors: almost insignificant objects, but animated by the significance that is given to them.

As a consequence, in her photos, even when abandoned places or elements of nature are portraid, people are always present. Objects become ‘charged’ by their actions and convictions. Because of that, the landscape or the architecture from the habitat are equally as expressive to the photografer as those who retreat to them.

The sensitivity for places that characterizes Matyn’s practice, reflects aswell itself in the installations where those images finally find a place. Installations that place the audience in an unknown surrounding forcing them out of their distant position.

The performance collective bissy bunder focusses on action theatre, making performances for specific occasions and places, often inviting musicians to accompany them with live music. Their performances are a mixture of current events, popular culture, literature, art, folklore and history. Through the logics of a dream, storylines are mingled with experimental sound, costumes, props and stage settings. Bissy bunder’s members are Johanna Trudzinski (DE), Julia Wlodkowski (DE), Kati Heck (DE), Michèle Matyn (BE), Tina Schott (DE) and Rani Bageria (AUT).

Read the reviews about Boterknieën in Tubelight, in Metropolis M and on Trendbeheer or read some other texts about Michèle on www.hanstheys.be.