Joke Raes

Joke Raes output ranges from drawings, sculptures and live performances to a variety of wearable.

My artistic work brings about entanglements of sensuous aesthetic caresses and repulsiveness. Disorienting elements are merged with archetypal themes, intimidating stickiness, and smoothness beside rough prickly nature and unbearable heaviness. Slowness and airy playfulness are interwoven with sudden endings.

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic slumber images, short flashes occurring before and after the dream stage, often form the basis of my pieces. My work offers a reflection on our own existence. This is an inexhaustible source from which I uncover very precise themes. Within my work I dissect themes such as 'death', 'enigma', 'perception', 'surprise', 'destruction' or 'symbiosis'.

My Creations often result in “totaalspektakel”, in which the entire space interacts with the work. Here I use all kinds of techniques and materials, industrial scrap materials, textiles, ceramics, glass or laser cutting.

Several SlumberS emerged between 2010 and 2013, as cross-over total concepts. 'Devil's Advocate' (2013) was commissioned by Walter Van Haerents as a performance with a connection to 'Sympathy for the Devil', the then current exhibition at Walter Van Haerents Art Collection. Here I started from the myth of Faust which I intertwined with impulses from my personal universe. In 2014 I had an exhibition titled 'AFFAIRES'. Here I worked around the dubious affaires of human being and nature. I'm looking for unusual spaces that have an interaction with the work and trigger me as an artist. Like the Red Sea where my knitting works were dancing in the water. After that, I went from the enigmatic underwater world to the Amazon forest to create performances. In September 2015 I participated in a special programm of the biennial of Contemporary Art in Moscow. There I showed an installation for the lonely visitor (Shelter 2015). At the moment I explore at HISK novel territories that will inevitably provoke new work.