Bio

Stef Meul (°1983, Brussels, Belgium) makes performances and choreographic artworks. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, his works are often developed by using intuitive associations, but these are rarely conclusive. Play and desire are important: during the artistic process, perception is altered to affect the everyday life and even common objects undergo transubstantiation.

His artworks demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often implements a narrative on the effects of social identity, synchronous dividuation and post-digital societies at the beginning of the 21st century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

The artworks enact the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, he finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humour that echoes our own inconsistencies. The artist also considers movement as a metaphor for a desire to affect an ecological totality and for engaging in tantric techniques of transindividual change.

Stef's works appear as spontaneous, common and dreamlike events in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse.
Timing and diachrony always play a key role. By developing different works for each presentation and allowing the evocative power of the work become unprecedented, he likes to seduce the senses of the spectator by interacting with compositions or settings that generate poetic situations, mixing multiple dimensions and balancing on the edge of recognition and unknown aspects of the self.

Artworks are on the one hand attractive and familiar, on the other hand absurd and disruptive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and unresolved thoughts. By questioning the concept of movement, he tries to focus on the activity of presenting. The character, shape or content of the presented artwork is secondary. The essential things are the instantaneous, the consequential and the intention of presenting.

Often his works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multi-layered meanings arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he often creates from the given instant, practically unpredictable, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.

Most of the artworks are presented with the aim not to provide an idealistic view but to dare to embody a space where light and the environment are important. The energy of a place and its emotional and spiritual vibrations are always important. By instigating spaces for performativity and opening an intent for sharing extensive social choreographic stages, he wants the viewer to become part of the art as a complicit. Art is to be able to be in touch with the work, as well to become interacting, loosing one's distant safe stance.

Stef's artworks are based on inspiring situations: visions that reflect a sensation of indisputability and serene contemplation, combined with subtle details of odd or eccentric, humoristic elements.