Annie-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Annie-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. From 1975 she started exhibiting her drawings, paintings, and later (multi-media) installations. In 1981, with Danny Devos, she founded the Club Moral, an artists’ initiative intended to present “extreme art in the field of performance, installation, and music”. Currently she teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and is a permanent guest-lecturer at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively all over Europe, in the USA, Australia, and in Hong Kong.
“AMVK’s interest lies in the alchemy of reality: not what it is, but what forces underly it (...) AMVK breaks open and binds. She shows the fetishism of our consciousness. The alliances AMVK describes never find once-and-for-all expression: the real reality is protean, ever-changing, shape-shifting. (...) (her) work displays a demiurgic will to total awareness; in her protest it takes on the repressive traits of the structures it aims to break down. (...) 

In contrast to the organisation of the world, her work attempts an anti-brainwash. A blunt choice, certainly in an art context in which an indirect approach is often taken, in which irony speaks from the corner of its mouth (...) She chooses protest - outside the context of protest. (...) With the face of the pantocrator, she steers our consciousness off the rails, outside itself.” (Dirk Pueltau)