M HKA Ensembles

Installation, installation with black and white slide projections, projection socle, +/- 20 minutes, loop, digitally controlled, variable dimensions, artist’s book .

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK007509).

Think of Joan of Arc and you think of an androgynous heroine, Dreyer’s and Bresson’s unforgettable films, a perverse question-and-answer game, a tormented body, a fraught symbol… What happens when an artist with all this at the back of her mind takes a fresh look at the historical sources? The work consists of a slide installation and a book. The lengthy series of black-and-white portraits of a particular young woman is occasionally interrupted by text slides showing questions – quotes from the inquisition trials held against Joan of Arc during the fifteenth century.

The process of identification, to which one is naturally inclined as a viewer, gets stuck. Through the utmost sobriety of the setting, the extreme simplicity of the pose, one reverts to what one had almost forgotten: that a young actress simply was asked to make believe. In the book, the outcome of Torfs’s preliminary investigation, Joan is manifest as the continually shifting focus of intricately intertwined stories, testimonies and tendentious interpretations from which a ‘truth’ can never be deduced. Du Mentir-Faux [On False Lying] voices several themes that frequently appear elsewhere in the work of Torfs. Among them are the relationship between text and image, or between reading and imagining, the question of the portrait (whether it is possible to capture, in a portrait, a ‘truth’ about the portrait subject) and – more broadly – the tension between fiction and reality. (source: Catherine Robberechts)