Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steven Fillet Bist du bei mir

Running alongside the physical exhibition As you wish, this online exhibition Bist du bei mir examines the intersection of life and work for choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and visual artist Steven Fillet. Both exhibition titles hint at Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which not only provides the overarching framework for this project but also reflects the rhythms, structures, and sensibilities through which life and work are intertwined for both artists.

Just as the exhibition title As you wish hints at the Quodlibet, the name of Bach’s final variation, the online exhibition Bist du bei mir takes its title from the aria “Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh,” preserved in one of the two notebooks Bach compiled for his wife Anna Magdalena. Notably, in these notebooks, Bist du bei mir appears directly before the aria that opens onto the labyrinth of the Goldberg Variations. Its presence in the notebook led to the long-held assumption that Bach composed it.

Echoing the sense of companionship suggested by this musical context, this online exhibition reveals how the place where De Keersmaeker and Fillet live, with grazing horses and cultivated land, becomes their studio. And how the rhythms of daily life and the cycles of nature flow through their artistic practices. In times of fragmentation and withdrawal, this being-together operates as a quiet resistance. Here, works by De Keersmaeker and Fillet are placed in close proximity, allowing an open, lively dialogue to unfold— “a double helix,” as De Keersmaeker once described it, “oppositional strands advancing and receding, interlacing into a figure eight that holds the promise of infinity.”