Els Dietvorst: Adrift

Wexford Arts Centre working collaboratively with the Highlanes Gallery and Uillinn—West Cork Arts Centre, and Wexford County Council will tour the work of Els Dietvorst throughout 2023–24. The tour, curated by Catherine Bowe and Karla Sánchez Zepeda, will present a coherent overview of her extensive and multifaceted oeuvre in addition to new works. It begins at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda running from Saturday 1 July to Saturday 19 August 2023, and travels to Uillinn, Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council in 2024.

Els Dietvorst’s practice is remarkably diverse and comprises drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, films and documentaries, performative actions, and one-act plays. The motivating factor behind this activity is the desire to connect, develop relationships, and collaborate with others. As the artist states “For me, creation is a collective process, inclusive and permeable to the world, to the living and the dead, to small neglected objects as well as to each other’s ideas.” Towards this end, Dietvorst uses dialogue, experiment, intuition, and collaboration as artistic strategies.

The title Adrift is a metaphor for how the artist sees our contemporary world as being not anchored but floating freely without a sense of purpose or direction. Showing an appreciation for what we usually consider to be different, undesirable, or inferior, Dietvorst explores life histories, interpersonal dialogues, migration and cultural differences, human dreams and desires, and the human condition. She pays specific attention to the position of the outsider and focuses her gaze—sometimes over a period of several years—on people and events that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Els Dietvorst is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker based in County Wexford. Her work has been shown and supported by organizations such as the Kaaitheatre, Brussels; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; M HKA Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; and BAK, Utrecht as well as internationally in New York, Casablanca, London, and Vienna.  She has been awarded international prizes such as the Evens Arts Prize in 2017, and more recently the Belgian Art Prize. In 2021, as part of the Belgian Art Prize, she hosted two exhibitions concurrently – This is what you came for – in Bozar and CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, both in Brussels.Els Dietvorst’s practice is remarkably diverse and comprises drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, films and documentaries, performative actions, and one-act plays. The motivating factor behind this activity is the desire to connect, develop relationships, and collaborate with others. Dietvorst uses dialogue, experiment, intuition, and collaboration as artistic strategies.

ADRIFT is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Flanders State of the Arts. It is run in association with ROSSINANT, Belgium.