Marieke Peeters

I create immersive installations, sculptures and films that combine intensive material research with performance. In my artistic practice I am dedicated to creating a form of expanded cinema, often taking the shape of a tableaux vivant. In highly tactile and sensorial installations, the visitor is subjected to overwhelming amounts of materiality as I facilitate immersive experiences that attempt to find comfort within the horrific. My practice is informed by horror as a genre and construct in which this conceptual framework helps me navigate an unstable social reality. Strange fibers, monochromatic textures, and vibrant matter. The materials I use mostly come from the domestic realm, like discarded curtains, old wallpaper, or brown sheep wool. They closely respond to memories which are translated into strange other worlds. In the immersive installation Between Whispering Walls, my childhood bedroom is cloaked in dark brown sheep wool making it something wholly alien yet also familiar. I like to play with contradictory elements within material, contrasting dark and very soft qualities of material to illuminate their ambiguity. The defamiliar body has a central presence in my practice as my work inhabits the uncanny realm between sculpture and performance. Sculptures become performers and performers become sculptures here in a symbiosis of the animate and inanimate. The uncanny doubt that is created by this blurring of boundaries quickly treads into horrific territory as the sense of control you believe you have over a work of art shifts. I am influenced by the work of cultural theorist Mark Fisher and feminist horror film theorists like Carol Clover and Alison Pierse.