In residence: Karel Tuytschaever

What does or does not the way of portraying someone else say about the creator?
‘Als de kunstenaar zijn beeld inslikt’ digs deeper into the barely explored domain of embodied knowledge in the relationship between the maker and his image of someone else.

Karel Tuytschaever investigates the role that the creator’s physicality plays in creating a visual representation of someone else. This is done by reciprocally purifying his hybrid makership and making his learning method as a discipline-wide teaching artist at the Antwerp Schools of Arts explicit.

As a theater and filmmaker, he searches for new ways to genuinely capture bodies in a 2D image, by using lens-based media and his body as a maker as equal instruments. In his learning method he links the various disciplines to physical awareness and emphasizes how the own physicality of makers in training can be a driving force in their vision and skill development.

This symbiotic and self-reflective research creates an interesting intermediate field in which a relevant consciousness for contemporary artistry arises, in which the body is the mediator between the world and an image. His methodology departs from the core values of his practice and aims to identify crucial elements in an evolution towards a more integral and reciprocal embodied artist practice. A practice consisting of the different layers of sensory embodied knowledge. This is necessary because our need for identity in a digitalized network society threatens to prevent us from productive involvement and empathy. In this way, Karel Tuytschaever hopes to contribute to (the awareness of) a more physical, tactile image in the visual and performing arts, and therefore a more layered multi-sensory viewing experience.