Ombre Indigène – Part 2, Martinique
Edith Dekyndt
2014, Belgium
Video projection
The work of Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt has a strong material character. Despite their sometimes dematerialised and abstract appearance, taking the form of video recordings, slide projections or minimalist installations, her works always question the relationship of humans with their material environment. Throughout her artistic practice, Dekyndt weaves links between history and contemporary creation.
Her video piece ‘Ombre Indigène’ (Native Shadow), from 2014, went viral on social media eight years later, accompanied by the claim that its subject had been hoisted by Iranian women as a symbol of the anti-Hijab protests of September 2022.
A flag made of black hair flutters lightly in the breeze above the rocky shores of Diamant, on the island of Martinique. Planted by Dekyndt on the very spot where, in 1830, a smuggling boat involved in clandestine slave trade was met with destruction, foundering on the rocks with its hundred African captives. The shot, taken close to the resting place of Martinique philosopher Edouard Glissant, pays tribute to the creator of the concepts of ‘whole-world’ and ‘creolization’.
By filming these softly quivering strands of hair, Edith Dekyndt created a subtly moving ‘still life’, whose meditative, hypnotic character lends it a universal, iconic quality that facilitated its adoption, in another context, as an emblem of a contemporary resistance movement.
Edith Dekyndt is a visual artist who established herself in the mid-1990s. Since then, she has become best known for working with everyday objects. These are typically forced into a transformation that leads to material transcendence, be it using chemical and physical reactions or deceptively simple interactions with the human body. The documentation of such processes is essential to the work, which ranges across all sorts of media: video, photography, sound, installation, and performance. Dekyndt also channels in her art a myriad of influences, from literature, art history, and philosophy, to science.
Dekyndt is represented internationally by industry-leading galleries: Galerie Konrad Fischer and Karin Guenther in Germany, Greta Meert in Belgium, and Carl Freedman in the UK.