Hanne Van Dyck is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels, Belgium. Her work delves into the interconnectedness of humans, nature, and the spirit world, exploring themes of togetherness and the transpersonal. Drawing inspiration from mythologies, sacred texts, and spiritual practices across cultures, Van Dyck examines transformative journeys, the cycles of life, and the relationship between the earthly and the otherworldly realms.
Van Dyck’s work is often performative, responding to and affected by others, realities and surroundings. Working on the human relationship with mountains, she has completed residencies in China, Switzerland and Morocco. She received a development grant from the Flemish Government to conduct research into trance healing ceremonies in Brazil, Belgium, China, and Morocco, where she lived and worked for several years.
Van Dyck translates long periods of reflection into mixed-media installations, text-based performances, videos, and publications. She has exhibited and performed her work in a variety of settings, from cultural spaces and festivals to unconventional locations that resonate with the themes of her work. She frequently collaborates with other artists, dancers, anthropologists, and those who engage with the spirit world.
As a core member of the Brussels Artist-Run Network, Van Dyck co-organizes gatherings for the local and international artist-run community. She co-founded Common Reflection - intimate dinners that nurture a supportive ecosystem for artists to connect and receive feedback on their work. A trained energetic coach and avid learner of nonviolence, she facilitates women’s circles, as well as grieving and celebration circles, fostering spaces of liberation and connection.
Van Dyck maximizes a poetic resourcefulness in her work, manifested in a partial loss of the documentary, to its recovery in the key of fiction. That is to say, her diaristic registrations and observations might be held to be documentary in nature—as if she were to shed light on forensic evidence for us—but are representational insofar as Van Dyck subtly adds additional mental building blocks in order to cope, grapple, face and translate these encounters. Her artistic registry and agency, in this sense, becomes a meticulous balance act of applying oneself to an environment and to make deductions from that application. Not to say reductions, or deconstructions, as to strip the things she encounters from their performance, but rather a type of constructivism that looks at how many performers are assembled in a subject—a mountain, for instance—and how many performers benefit from, and are needed to sustain its existence.
Then, what is to be taken from Van Dyck’s application to the environment, by putting her encounters on the translation table, to the subsequent transposition of her findings into both an artistic context and the space and time of an artwork? I only suppose that the mental building blocks she adds come to represent attempts and approaches to rendering oneself—and also us, visitors, to some extent—sensitive and conscious to an environment, to one’s place in a scheme and an ecology of things and interrelations, and how that placement, that venturing outward of oneself both shapes the relations with other, external things and entities, but also, more importantly, how these things come to shape us.
The works of Hanne Van Dyck may remind us of such contested and dubious positioning ground for the human figure, of being wholly embedded within an environment whilst remaining to consider oneself as an external force. Through her work, she introduces a number of templates from which her fieldwork is translated into a new patchwork of significations and meanings, as to underscore this push and pull, forward and backward between observer and active participant, of human phenomenality and language within contexts devoid and indifferent to such readings. By invoking the ghosts of previous states, she tells us stories of the memories and histories we may attach to these subjects and our encounters with them, practiced through the idea of—paraphrasing Donna Haraway—in order to become one, you have to be many in the first place, also as to be enabled to talk about the tissues of being anything in the first place, a mountain, a plant, a drop of water, a cloud-being, a pine tree, a flock of sparrows. We are legion!
- Niekolaas Lekkerkerk, The Office For Curating