Edith Dekyndt: Notes on What is What

Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to present our first solo exhibition of the artist Edith Dekyndt, titled Notes on What is What. Dekyndt's work comprises painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and performance. Focusing on an assemblage of materials and their qualities, Dekyndt enacts time-based processes upon objects culled from their original environment, creating catalysts for transformation and change.  Emphasizing the living quality of all materials, her objects undergo decay, entropy, and disruption from original states of being-activations often carried out upon humble, everyday materials. Subjected to the cyclical rhythms of the earth, they parallel the ever-revolving conditions of ecological change around us. Seeking out communities, modes of existence, and diverse histories, Dekyndt's work forges a bridge to an enhanced level of consciousness among all living things.

As a point of departure for this exhibition, Dekyndt focuses on the vision of an insular society preserved from the forces that shape the rest of the world, a theme inspired from Aldous Huxley's final novel, "Island," published in 1962, in which conditions for a possible co-existence between living beings, resources, and ways of inhabiting the world are reimagined.

The island emerges here as a territory of condensation. Defined by its boundaries, it offers the possibility of observing the circulation of matter, narratives, and practices on a scale where the complexity of the world becomes perceptible without ever being simplified. These insular microcosms, with their fragile balances and interdependencies, have long informed the artist's reflection.

On Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Dekyndt encountered a community seeking to develop a new economic and cultural model grounded in reciprocity between territory, its inhabitants, and artistic creation. On Ibiza, another form of insularity comes into play: a magnetism-both geological and symbolic-that has, for centuries, attracted artists, musicians, alternative communities, and club culture, turning the island into a site of successive projections.

In Dekyndt's work, the viewer encounters traces of a journey. Fishing ropes from Fogo Island fused with glass are on display in vitrines, alongside 3-D prints on found wood and animal skins, and new tapestry presented on the surrounding wall. The objects in olive, pine, or petrified wood are representative of the unconventional material supports that Dekyndt favors, fossilized remnants of erosion and time. These sculptures, with their algorithmically generated 3D extensions, carry refined mutations enveloping bases of wood, pelt, or sheepskin.

The Water Sizzling at the Prow, a large-scale tapestry derived from facsimiles of found boat carpets from Fogo Island, extends the seafaring narrative. A large-scale fabric, Underground, Santa Agnès de Corona, Ibiza Island, 2023-2024, resonates as a living record of material time, having been submerged for months underground. Dekyndt's research into the ecological impact of invasive species upon native fauna of Ibiza informs Animal Methods, 2024, a video work which examines the interchangeable behaviors of animals and humans. The sloughed off skin of a snake becomes a flag in the wind, its color and texture serving as a stark contrast to the peaceful connotation of a white flag. Snakes attack with poison only as a form of defense, unlike humans, who may choose to be violent for a multitude of reasons. The billowing of its molten remains conversely feels meditative and calming, compared to the performative symbols and aggressions of mankind.

Wisdom of the Other Shore, in the form of a 3D print of sand, evokes a mirage, a lost utopia or desert island world. Why Would A Beach Tree and Gothic Moat in the Faraway Green Valley, are comprised of 3D prints on Carob or petrified wood, shown alongside 3D prints in a range of materials, and textile works that have undergone similar stages of decomposition, bringing them into poetic harmony with the temporalities of the earth.

The works brought together in this exhibition connect these two distant geographies, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The objects that compose them carry the memory of these journeys and of the contexts from which they emerged. Placed in dialogue, they articulate a material language in which distances collapse and correspondences arise without hierarchy. Faithful to her practice, Edith Dekyndt does not seek to represent these territories, but rather to make perceptible the subtle forces that traverse them: those that connect materials to histories, gestures to landscapes, and objects to the forms of life they make possible.

Edith Dekyndt was born in Ieper, Belgium in 1960 and lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. In her video, sculpture, installation, drawing, sound and performance, Dekyndt explores the natural and cultural phenomena of the world through a minimalist lens. Applying physical and chemical processes, Dekyndt brings forth the ephemerality of objects, images and sound to convey the transitory elements of time, light and space. Dekyndt's body of work is suspended between the tangible and intangible, allowing permeability in the perception of what is real.

A forthcoming monograph From Two Thousand and Sixteen to Two and Thousand Twenty Three will be republished this year, covering a period of her work from 2016-2023.   Other recent monographs on Dekyndt's work include  It could be James on the beach. It could be. It could be very fresh and clear, published on the occasion of her exhibition at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens; and Tell Us Something Nobody Knows, published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Dekyndt’s work will be on view at Bozar Brussels from October 2026- Jan 2027 as part of Cristóbal Balenciaga x Edith Dekyndt, a special exhibition that engages her work with selected garments from the Balenciaga archive and addresses the notion of material transformation.

Dekyndt's works were recently featured in the solo presentation titled It could be James on the beach. It could be. It could be very fresh and clear, at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium (2026). ⁠She was recently a Fogo Island Arts Artist-in-Resident in 2024. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2025), Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (2024), Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Italy (2024), Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection (2023), WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2016), Musée de l’Abbaye de Sainte Croix, Les sables d’Olonne, France (2016), Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2015), Centre d’art contemporain, Lyon, France (2013). She has participated in the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de America del Sur (2019), Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2021), Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2nd edition, Latvia (2020), Musee de la inmigración, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019), the 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017), 5th Moscow Biennale, Russia (2013), 5th Biennal of Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2011), Brussels Biennial, Midi Station, Belgium (2008), and Biennale de la photographie, MAMAC, Liège, Belgium (2008).

Selected group exhibitions include the recent Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafricaa at the Art Institute of Chicago (2024-25); Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order at WIELS, Belgium (2025), Lantz'scher Skulpturenpark, Germany (2025), Art Institute of Chicago (2025), ZKM | Karlsruhe Museum (2025), Artmuseum Z33, Hasselt, Belgium (2024), Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy (2023 and 2019), Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (2022), GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2021), Fondation Cab (2017), Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2017), SMAK Ghent, Belgium (2015, 2010 and 2009), Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2015 and 2014), Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, Missouri, USA (2014).