MiekeBal

Installations
Madame B | Chapter
Multiple-screen video installation, 2014
Multi-lingual with English subtitles
Immersion in Reality
Through this exhibition, we suggest that in the contemporary world, the ways we look are as important as the ways we behave socially. The economic and amorous adventures that lead to Emma’s demise are largely triggered by the audio-visual stimuli that surround her. Thus, as much as social issues that are still raging today, the exhibition foreground just as much the different modes of looking in visual culture.As an experience of audio-visual art, the exhibition also offers an exercise in recognizing different forms of looking and the performative consequences they produce. No video exhibition based on _Madame Bovary_ exists to date. We aim to supplement this lack, believing as we do that an exhibition offers a more free, yet more intesnee experience than a film of predictable length. Fragmented into the 19 screens of this exhibition, visitors can confront the fact that the life of a woman of 150 years ago can as well happen today. Shunning moralism or propaganda, the works engage visitors critically and artistically at the same time. Because of the immersive nature of the exhibition, this realisation can dawn on each visitor in relation to his or her own life, environment, situation, and desires. A plea for attention to the audio-visual, rather than the linguistic-only, and to a multi-sensuous understanding of the world rather than an intellectual-only one, the exhibition presents the first of its kind inspired by the novel so frequently filmed but never engaged in this updating manner.

