Alexis Destoop
Online residence 4 August – 31 October 2020
Alexis Destoop. Born 1971 in Belgium. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Brussels, Belgium.
Alexis Destoop’s work explores the workings of the image and narrative, the experience of time, and the processes of identification and memory. His practice originates from photography but has been influenced by his experience in the performing arts as well as his studies in art history and philosophy. Referencing classical representations of the human figure, his earlier works focus on duration and performativity. In recent years, landscape has become his primary subject matter, which he treats with all its stratified meanings and histories.
Photo: Alexis Destoop
Destoop is particularly interested in the artificiality of landscape: rather than treating it as a sublime natural object, he approaches it as a thoroughly human construct – with stratified meanings and histories. This explains the decision to attend to contentious zones where global and local processes and interests collide and intertwine, and where it becomes possible to rethink notions of centre and periphery, self and other.
Blending fact and fiction, history and speculation, Destoop offers a fragmented, subjective cartography of the transitory states that constitute our present era.
Recent solo shows and presentations include:
Northern Drift at IFFR – Bright Future (2020), Field Meeting at Concrete, Dubai (2019), Plouton at Chauffeur, Sydney (2018), Four Directions of Heaven at Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2017).
Recent group exhibitions:
The Work of Time at Z33, Hasselt (2020), Topos of Time at MMOMA. Moscow (2019), 1st Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia, (2018) Contour 556, Public Art Biennial, Canberra (2018).