Annie Gentils Gallery

Stefaan Dheedene (B. 1975 Kortrijk BE), lives and works in Ghent, Belgium

He is lector at KASK school of Arts Ghent and head of the Department of Autonomous Arts KASK (School of Arts Ghent).

The installations and videos of Stefaan Dheedene center on the reproduction, repetition, and reorganization of recognizable signs and objects, like baseball bats or wooden furniture. In Billy (2006), he commented on the anonymous nature of industrial production by hiring a carpenter to reproduce an IKEA bookcase in slightly better-quality wood; a video of the bookcase’s construction accompanied the installation. Ironically, though, Dheedene exhibited the original IKEA piece, having returned the one fabricated by the carpenter to IKEA without anyone being the wiser.

The work, as with his practice in general, speaks to ideas of authenticity, originality, ownership, and art as a commodity.

Stefaan Dheedene is concerned with the functional, unpretentious object. He subjects it to non-functional study, to observation and exercise; he applies

experimental, material procedures to it. His artistic production, consisting mainly but not exclusively of sculptural work and installations, is controlled, as it were, by‘findings’; by an unintentionally revealed potential for imitation, association, or transformation. In the studio – practice, workshop, thinking place - another 'political' order is imposed on us: a kind of shift of role and meaning.