Vincent Meessen
Vita Nova
2009
Duration 26 min
Born 1971 in Baltimore, USA; lives in Brussels, Belgium
Meessen’s work has been called speculative realism or, as he terms it, documents d'expérience. His interest lies in the influence of realism and colonial rhetoric on the development of Western modernity. He conducts archival investigations using various media (video, installation, prints, music and others), reanimating hidden narratives and traces of the colonial in the present in order to produce narratives that question our ability to deal with the colonial ghosts of modernity. In recent works he makes use of the filmic essay to re-read texts by writers such as Roland Barthes in various postcolonial African situations, applying deconstructivist tools to famous texts. Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasise the intelligence of collectives and of mythic and conceptual characters.
http://bamart.be/en/artists/detail/730 http://jubilee-art.org/?rd_page=29-2/32-2&lang=en
Vincent Meeseen©
