The exhibition project Middle Gate II – The Story of Dymphna is a collaboration between M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and the cultural centre de Werft in Geel. Middle Gate II is the follow up to the exhibition Middle Gate, curated by Jan Hoet in Geel in 2013. The exhibition concept is closely tied to the legend of the holy Dymphna, saint of the possessed, the mentally ill and patroness against epilepsy and insanity. The legend of Dymphna shares a strong connection to the identity of Geel, "the charitable city".

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK

(c)image: AMVK
Hoeren en Profeten, 1983
Installation , dimensions variable

"Whores and Prophets I presented in a hind-quarter of the building. The space was filled with enormous piles of dirt from wood carton and paper. The installation was made out of 5 elements, which I placed in a certain circuit through which the spectator was led.

The 1st element was formed by arranged dirt around an imaginative laying figure, which was in its turn completed with plexi-tables on which images of naked women. The head was made of an assemblage of a great leaning backward woman figure.

The 2nd element were 3 graves ; piles of dirt on which portraits of false prophets, prototypes of their kind: Ernst, Orwell/ Huxley, Beckett.

The 3rd element as a 50m long paper loop on which 2 fights are repeated over and over: 2 male wrestlers and a copulating man + woman.

The 4th element was a Super8 film loop : a drawn animation of 4 dogs that undergo a rhythmic over-excitation. Thereby the words EXCITATION - INHIBITION.

The 5th element were drawings in rubber on PVC-plates. Images of contact-points and rejection-points.

The whole of the installation was finished with the smell of sulpher and my whispering voice shrouding in low frequencies : I ENJOY YOU!

The opening was graced by a music-performance by Club Moral.

The whole goes parallel with the essay “La théorie écologique et la transmission des fantômes “, San Sebastian, 28 April 1981. R. Guardans.

This theory represents the contemporary structure of a society in which, through a puzzled out exploitation of the fear and a clear erotic code, has in it each transport of information, images and phantasms (“the transfer of chimeras”) in a control able manner each future through a puzzled out development and allowing inventions.

“In an ecologic view the transfer of chimeras is now what earlier used to be in their time gutters and asylums; places where shit and dirt flew into each other and where the future was whitewashed.

The trade, the economy has all means to part the clean from the dirty. All collective dirt, which remains in our hands after the gutters, the concentration camps and other desinfectants from above, thàt is the ‘colonialism’, the ‘inquisition’.

The anti-inventing of these practises, productors of pub1ic and private shit, is the kind of ecological theory that interests me.”

(R. Guardans)"


"The importance of Transmarginal Inhibition in 5 steps:

1. Whores. Tables. Cross.

2. 2fights. Transport.

3. 3Prophets. Grave

4. 4Dogs. FLexor. Relax.

5. Bodies. Wander."

− AMVK