M HKA Ensembles

THINKING VISUALLY

The notion of visual thinking was strongly apparent in the works of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Alevtina Kakhidze and Bia Davou.

Thinking can also take place in visual registers; complex ideas, emotions and situations can be expressed clearly and holistically by visual means combining primordial pre-linguistic reasoning and sophisticated media literacy. The primacy of codification into signs and symbols has been reversed by digital media allowing for immediate creation and exchange of images. Visual art is an outcome of the mental capacity of visual thinking.

Van Kerckhoven offers her services as a ‘head-nurse’; she believes visual art – as a form of thinking - may have a healing role in a world grounded in images. Kakhidze likewise takes drawing as a primary mode of thinking. Here, it is the backdrop for samples – selected by the EMST staff - of the three types of ‘news’ she made for the 6^th Moscow Biennale (2015), were she produced every day “past news” (mainly about the war in Ukraine) “present news”, about what was happening around the biennale, and “future news”, a horizon of hope.  Davou departs in an associative journey from serial structures based on mathematic sequences that transform into sails and Homeric references.

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