Born in 1993, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Emerging aesthetic typologies, permeating visual culture and discourse, reflect how trends shape Western societies' fascination with an idealized, ritualized rural lifestyle, imbued with nostalgia for the “good old days”. Doris Hardeman's artistic and writing practice questions the mechanics of this glorification process of tradition. Objects, materials, symbols and narrative fragments are arranged in poetic assemblages, landscapes of a 2.0 romanticism. What are we re-enacting on the stage of late capitalism? Left-stage, symbolism reigns supreme, with manufactured authenticity, a fantasized past and alienated workers. Right-stage, emancipatory fictions, a shared desire to escape, reflexive idleness. Far from falling into an easy, rigid dualism, Doris Hardeman's work opens up dramaturgies where the attentive eye can find glimpses of questioning, lethargic characters with elusive minds. Entangled in ordinary tragedies, they inhabit her texts but desert her installations, leaving behind only traces of their passing. Sensitive to the materials, values and uses that shape things and spaces, Doris Hardeman questions the way in which a place, an object or a story becomes a symbol, acquiring an ideological charge that surpasses its utilitarian scope. Fiction then exceeds function, ornament becomes structural, roses, moldings and scrolls quote a tale that might have never been.