Sarah Vanhee

Throughout one year, Sarah Vanhee collected rubbish, whether real or virtual. With these ‘remains’ – ranging from vegetable peelings to spams – she creates a luxurious environment to perform in, a place where nothing is lost, where birth and death rub shoulders and there is no wastage. For nearly three hours, the artist carefully unwraps cardboard boxes, accompanying her gestures with a discourse that plays on the deterioration of language. The installation and performance are presented as an ecological system rather than total chaos. Various kinds of organisation and gradations begin to emerge more or less clearly from this jungle of garbage, indicating something like a path through the journey.

Sarah Vanhee’s practice blends performance, visual arts and literature. Often created in situ, her works are concerned with the interaction between the spectator and the surroundings that they put in place. They totally blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, in order to push out the limits of the imagination and to raise questions about society, conventions and artistic commonplaces. Vanhee takes issue with the dominant models that influence our ways of thinking, speaking, and moving, as well as our relationships with others and the world. She combats existing paradigms with the weapons of absurdity, utopia and poetry...

Coproduction CAMPO (Gand), HAU – Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival, Noorderzon (Groningen) & Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels)
With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union and the Flemish Community

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).