° 1950

Lives in Bruges (BE), born in Knokke (BE).

"Daniël Dewaele has been an active member of the Belgian arts scene since at least the early seventies, and quite early on became involved, on a quasi-regular basis, with the Antwerp-based ICC, the museum’s historical ‘parent’ institution. In 1980, Dewaele ventured out into the street armed with a video camera and one simple question: "what does the ICC mean to you?", mapping the extent of the proverbial man-in-the-street’s connection with (or, more pointedly, disconnection from) the world of contemporary art. In 2004, the video recording of this quasi-performance was screened at the entrance of the exhibition "Dear ICC", in which the museum looked back at certain long-forgotten aspects of its own prehistory. MuHKA also owns a series of photographs documenting another performance simply titled "Exhibiting", which Dewaele conceived for the doors of the historical Groeninge museum in Bruges in 1976. Another work from 1976, titled "24.800 m2 sculpture", highlights Dewaele’s early engagement with what only much later became known as "institutional critique": the work’s physical roots are in a mail art project in which several museums generously offered their exhibition spaces to the artist by way of their official letterhead - a virtual exhibition covering some twenty-five thousand square meters of institutional ground."