Els Dietvorst

Els Dietvorst (° 1964, Kapellen, BE) is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Duncormick, Ireland.

She uses dialogue, experiment and intuition as her main artistic strategies. Since the nineties, the artist has been moved by social issues such as migration, racism and climate change. Dietvorst looks back on the ‘human condition’. As a result, major themes such as life and death, fear, alienation and longing, and the “outsider” are addressed in her work. Els Dietvorst makes use of a range of media: sculptures and installations, drawings, writings and recently also visual installations.

Her work has been shown and supported by art institutions and festivals such as the Kaaitheater, Brussels; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; M HKA, Antwerp; Muzee, Ostend; Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow and BAK, Utrecht. She also showed work in New York, Casablanca, London and Vienna. In 2020, M HKA brought together Els Dietvorst’s oeuvre for the first time in the exhibition Dooltocht / A desperate quest to find a base for hope. In 2017 she received the Evens Art Prize and in 2018 she won the prize for anthropology and sustainable development at the international Jean Rouche festival in Paris with her documentary I watched the white dogs of the dawn. Els Dietvorst is currently a researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp and is preparing a PhD at the University of Antwerp with the title Partisans of the Real.