Helen Anna Flanagan: Gesticulating... WildlyIKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, 2021
This video- and installation-based exhibition brings together Flanagan’s Gestures film trilogy (2019-2020) for the first time, in which the artist positions characters in a particular public space and causes them to collide in peculiar ways. Echoing this choreographed approach, her films are embedded within a playful installation in IKOB’s exhibition space. Elements such as minimal brick walls, floor markings and sculptural works that draw from various film scenes simultaneously structure and unsettle the viewer’s experience. 

Flanagan’s primary concern is the exploration of how and why people act in certain ways, leading her to imagine how different characters might relate and react to the underlying structures of society and power. Like the houseflies that act as a recurring motif throughout Flanagan's films, the exhibition implicates viewers in turn as passive observers, carriers of information, or invasive parasites.

Exhibition generously supported by Mondriaan Fonds and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

View or download the multilingual publication here, designed by Stefanie Rau with texts by Brenda Guesnet (curator, IKOB), Ash Kilmartin (artist) and Eva Wittocx (curator, M Leuven).

Photography: Lola Pertsowsky