Ana Torfs: Figments & Fragments

For her first solo exhibition in the Nordic countries, Belgian visual artist Ana Torfs brings together two major installations, The Parrot & the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria (2014) and Legend (2009). Toast, an iconic photograph she made in 2003, functions as a connecting element between the two installations. On the occasion of this exhibition, Torfs made a two-sided poster in collaboration with graphic designer Jurgen Persijn.

Since the early 1990s, Ana Torfs has been composing a unique, visually striking oeuvre, which addresses fundamental questions of representation and its narrative structures. The relation or tension between text and image plays a central role in her work, and with it all the related processes of visualization, interpretation, perception, manipulation and translation. Torfs enables a topical and authentic perception of the scattered fragments from our cultural and political history. Literary texts or historical documents often constitute the starting point of her works. These material remnants are then reworked into meticulously composed installations—with diverse reproducible media such as slide projections, sound, photography and video, to tapestries and silk screens—in which projections and allusions have free reign.

Ana Torfs, born in Belgium in 1963, lives and works in Brussels. Among other solo exhibitions, she has shown at Centro de Arte Moderna, Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2016), WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2014), Generali Foundation, Vienna (2010), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2008), Argos centre for art and media, Brussels (2007), daadgalerie, Berlin (2006), GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2006) and Bozar, Brussels (2000). She has developed a web project for Dia Art Foundation, New York (2004).

Ana Torfs has participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Contour Biennial 8, Mechelen (2017), Parasophia, Kyoto (2015), 1st International Biennial of Cartagena de Indias (2014), Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013), Manifesta 9, Genk (2012), Montreal Biennial 2 (2000), and Lyon Biennial 3 (1995). Her work was also shown in important group exhibitions in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Australian Center for Contemporary art in Melbourne, Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Museion in Bolzano, the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, and the Mucsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest.