Benjamin Verdonck

Benjamin Verdonck, born 1972, is an all-round artist who lives and works near Antwerp. Both actor and writer, visual artist and theatre maker, his art practice resists genres or classification. From theatre pieces on stage to performances in public space, across objects and art installations, to miniature mobile theatres on the go, Verdonck displays a catching simplicity in his visual language, but not in his thinking. For already 20 years, he touches our consciousness with elements of playful fantasy, makes language a material, and lets the space and the objects speak. Often, his work reveals a conscious – even activist – endeavour to tackle local or global urgencies (e.g. the ecological catastrophe, consumption and economics) from within.

In the search for new forms of ’tafeltoneel’ (table scenes, miniature theatre), Verdonck has recently been creating a series of table-sized mobile theatres. With few words but many strings, colours, geometric figures, opening doors and closing curtains, he rewires theatre to its most essential form, close and on a human scale. His magical showboxes have the potential to emerge anywhere in cities, indoors or outside, to disappear just as quickly. They reveal an audiovisual poetry that is both puzzling and tangible, with Verdonck as machinist and protagonist at once.