Vered Ben-Kiki
Vered Ben-Kiki Fishman: Everything is a kind of pretend Visual artist Vered Ben-Kiki Fishman has lived in Belgium since the early 1980s, since she came to Europe from Israel on a scholarship to study painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Her work is sober, often without perspective or other techniques to suggest depth or relief. She uses pastel colors and ink, collage, music and performance to shape her universe, developing a style that touches everyone's collective memory.
When she arrived in Belgium, Vered Ben-Kiki became fascinated by the film world. Her great admiration for the films of Woody Allen, Luis Buñuel, and especially The Marx Brothers makes her refrain from claiming a role within that world. However, she does work with the individual elements and structures that shape film, which are also related to a comics culture that she discovers in Belgium: script or speech bubbles, cinematic sequence of frames, montage, image and sound, drama and dialogue. The western comic in Dutch translation in particular attracts her attention; she considers a cowboy - a symbol of silent masculinity - who exclaims 'Come on, to the horses!' to be a caricature in itself. Ben-Kiki literally developed a language of images, words may play a role, but they are presented clumsily, emphasizing how inadequate they are to express a deeply human feeling. From her background as a philosophy student and knowledge of Hebrew, English and some Arabic, and the immersion in another split culture such as Belgium, with its French-speaking and Dutch-speaking interactions, simple concepts such as 'here', 'there', 'yesterday' 'now' become redistributed in an unstable landscape. In March 2023, Vered Ben-Kiki will be commemorated with an exhibition of her work in Brussels, entitled everything is connected to everything and a performance pour MISS VERED: Artist – Poet – Musician – Performer Asteroid 42 by Christine Clinckx. Dressed in a plastic overcoat, Clinckx asks all visitors to write a message on a stone and place it on the ground near one of the works on display. When Ben-Kiki worked with Serge De Taeye (1965 – 2000), 'Asteroid 42' was her performance name. Clinckx remembers that Ben-Kiki found it fascinating and funny that Asteroid 42 had tried so hard to grow, it was immense with a diameter of 100.2 km, and that it had just not managed to become a planet. acknowledges.
“She also thought it was hilarious that the asteroid had many irregularly shaped bodies, which she liked to compare to people here on Earth with all their different shapes. You can find the shapes in her large drawings and she allowed bodies to communicate with each other about their shape. The Astroide 42, also called Isis (named after a woman! (Elizabeth) Isis Pogson. astronomer daughter of the discoverer N.R. Pogsons) was described as independent and headstrong and therefore evil, which she loved. In the performances with Serge she played Astroide 42 (negative, idiosyncratic, evil, independent) and told what shape she had – uneven, with holes and bumps, less streamlined, beautiful or even ugly – and Serge (positive, docile,…) was also a shape, but a beautiful one. They played yin and yang, balanced by opposites – or Lilith versus Eve or God versus the Devil or man versus woman.” (Clinckx, January 2024)
Vered Ben-Kiki becomes involved in various bands that were created under the impulse of jazz musician and composer Luc Mishalle; she designs LP/CD covers for Marakbar (1993) Marockin' Antwerp (1993), El Adoua (1998), Marockin' Strings (2000), Aywa by Luc Mishalle (2004), Saxafabra by Cezariusz Gadzina (2007), Marockin' Brass – Beats & Pieces (2018), she is a singer in the band Marockinettes and plays percussion in the group Al-Harmoniah (1998). In 2013 she released her own music, guitar and vocals, under the title: B e w o n d e r – The Eyes Of The Beloved. She participates in a cultural music program for Radio Centraal and from 1990 to 1996 she also occasionally gives a newspaper from THE BOTTOM, New York. Paris . London, with contributions from Serge De Taeye, Jef Lambrecht, Dominique Grégoire, Hugo Heyrman, Chris Straetling, Lieve Lambrecht, Jessica Lens, Guy Rombouts, Monika Droste and Iskender Alpdemir, among others. Published by her own publisher Af&Toe in Scheldestraat Antwerp.
Since 2008 she has focused on making children's books in different languages, such as Deek the dragon is in love (2008), Hanna is afraid to go to school (2009), Elias, grandpa & the Amsterdam Pirates Corporation (2009), Alice (2012), Artuur invites you to his event (2015), Daniel and the gambling cat Oracle (2015), July Rose and the flying carpets (2015), Tilly Lee, the genius (2015), Hanna and the Blue Knights (2015) ), Gabriel and his teacher (2017), Stories for Monday (2017), The crazy cat and mom (2017). Vered Ben-Kiki played an important role in the Antwerp art scene of the 1990s and later. She showed her work in solo exhibitions at Galerie Inexistent (Antwerp, 1990) and the Kanaal Art Foundation (Kortrijk, 1993) and in group exhibitions at the Chagall House (Haifa, 1985), the Helen Rubinstein Pavilion (Tel Aviv, 1986), the Museum for Contemporary Art (Ghent, 1988), De Warande (Turnhout, 1989), Galerie Container (Florence, 1989) and Witte de With (Rotterdam, 1994).