Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys
For 20-odd years, Belgian artists Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys have created a body of 21 video works possessed of the darkly divided spirit of collaboration, their peculiar productions being those of artists acting not only in consort with one another, but also with the hidden forces occupying the territories (both physical and psychological) in which their haunting narratives take place. Site readings illuminate their realm: sparse, constructed spaces that sometimes look like stages, at other times, fall-out shelters for deflated characters who always seem to be post-something: -trauma, -language, -human. The stories stutter along, stunted hybrids of eviscerated fairy tales and exhausted melodramas. The actors – untrained, and largely drawn from the artists’ circles of family and friends – do not perform so much as gesture and pose in a style so stripped of theatrics it could be mistaken for a list of symptoms: unmoving, unspeaking, punctured, perverse. (Imagine Bresson’s mannequins rendered spiritless, or Herzog’s hypnotized cast of Heart of Glass relieved of panic’s propeller). On top of that, the artists film their numbskulls in sheer stupidity – in transparent veils of fo…
Films