Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steven Fillet Bist du bei mir

What unfolds is a field of resonances, echoing a lineage from Aby Warburg to Walter Benjamin: a mode of thinking in associations and constellations. Juxtaposing images becomes a form of listening—a way of lingering in that fragile space where meaning briefly illuminates before fading again.

This approach aligns closely with De Keersmaeker’s own thinking. Some time ago, she showed me two images: one of her vegetable garden, geometry born of necessity; the other, a drawing that mirrors the very same figures. In that pairing, something essential surfaced. Her thinking moves in spirals—circling from the structure of a leaf to a musical interval, or from the rhythm of walking to the architecture of dance. One thought yields to the next: a restless current of connections, in which understanding follows what appears—carried along, unnecessary to name or explain.

De Keersmaeker first created her Goldberg Variations with a classical, frontal setup, placing the audience directly opposite the work. When presented in the Medina of Tunis in 2023, the piece underwent a profound shift. Performed outdoors and surrounded by spectators, a new relationship emerged—more intimate, immediate, and fluid. “The circle is a democratic form par excellence, because every spectator has the same proximity and access to the event.” A living experience that repeats itself here, in the performance created for Xavier Hufkens, flowing through the architecture of Robbrecht and Daem, shaped by the spaces, responsive to their scale and entangled with the paintings and the public. That turn toward proximity carries through into the drawings. They draw the viewer in, toward the point where looking almost becomes touching.

Naked, or nearly so, her body is wrapped in a thin sheet of gold foil. Against a black void, she moves to a fragment of The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988; the body folds open and closed. The camera stays still—a single fixed frame that simply records. This steady, unblinking gaze recalls the early Portapak years: the raw, solitary experiments of Bruce Nauman or Lili Dujourie, who turned the camera into a mirror, a witness to the bare intimacy of body and studio. The movement is small, instinctive—like a child folding herself into a blanket. Egon Schiele’s Girl Wrapped in a Blanket (1911) comes to mind: knees drawn up, the blanket loosely gathered, pale, translucent skin touched by sudden glints of color—a cheek, a knee, a shoulder.

This act of envelopment—in the fragile cocoons of Marisa Merz, the textile bodies of Annette Messager, the earthy veils of Ana Mendieta, or the felt blankets of Joseph Beuys—speaks to a shared meditation on protection, transformation, and connection. Each gesture navigates the tension between inside and outside, visible and hidden, self and surroundings. It is the wrapping of a newborn, the shroud of the deceased, the ritual of sacrifice. A threshold, marking transitions between states, between body and world.

De Keersmaeker’s film is both simple and celestial. It folds the body back into itself as a source of energy, while reflecting the light that enters from the window. For a moment, the human brushes the cosmic. The dance becomes a flicker in the universe—a movement between earth and sun, between the vulnerable human body and a vast, almost unimaginable cosmos.

Its formal echo in the works that follow, also studies of light and movement—now in ink, oil and pencil on paper and panel—creates a momentum, allowing the eye to discover a gentle companionship between the works, across time and medium.

In the first work, a leaf makes its way across paper. Not outdoors, where wind might seize it, but indoors where it is gently nudged, guided, urged forward by a pencil. What remains is a faint aftermath: a wake of lines, light, tentative, almost etched, as though time itself had brushed past and left a mark. The paper becomes a surface on which time settles, gradually, layer by layer – an image that dwells on its own making.

The second work is placed on the floor: four elements arranged, displaced, recombined, creating a dynamic field of form and meaning. The use of gold paint on black roofing, a recurrent material in Fillet’s work, echoes the preceding film. Here, time appears through a shrinking patch of light that forms a golden triangle, a shape poised between representation and abstraction. Gold, historically tied to the immaterial, here meets the dense industrial darkness of roofing—an interplay of weight and luminosity, matter and image that runs throughout Fillet’s practice.

The installation asks something of the body. You bend. You lean. You step closer. Gravity makes itself felt. The pull toward the floor is unmistakable—striking, especially in relation to the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Concrete yet open, modular yet ephemeral, the work becomes a choreography in which the viewer becomes a user who can actively participate.

This online exhibition concludes with a recent work that condenses much of what precedes it. Three figures, floating in a seemingly casual suspension, cast their shadows onto a geometric drawing. Their presence echoes the folk song “Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben, hat meine Mutter Fleisch gemacht, war ich geblieben…” (“Cabbage and turnips drove me away; if my mother had cooked meat, I would have stayed…”) that is associated with the Goldberg Variations’ Quodlibet. Like the underlying pentagram—traditionally the number of man (five fingers, five toes, five senses)—the figures evoke the carnal, the earthly, the nurturing, the material, even as their weightlessness paradoxically suggests otherwise: a contrary, quasi-immaterial pull. On the canvas, these elements weave together, just like Bach tossing a folk melody in the Quodlibet, giving a sense of the Bach household where music was a constant, every-present fact of life. Here, it comes back as a reminder that art is never separate from the life in which it is rooted.

Lieze Eneman, 2025