AMVK

Having originally studied graphic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) has been a prolific artist since the 1970s, with a particular focus on drawings on paper and synthetic materials, installations and video. Exploring the relationships between societal concerns, science, philosophy, politics and art, her practice can be seen as resolutely feminist, in which images of objectivised female bodies meet machine aesthetics and systems thinking. In the mid-1990s, Van Kerckhoven began creating a body of work around the alter-ego of the HeadNurse, who offered art as a source of healing whilst playing with representations of women within images and visual culture at large. Inspired by the experiments of the renowned Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels, where the brain, cognitive function and the unconscious are analysed, Van Kerckhoven has sought to use the utopian possibilities of science to improve the mind and, by extension, to propose a more humane society.

Van Kerckhoven has been an established participant in the artistic scene in Antwerp throughout her career as both an artist and organiser. In 1982, she had the first of many solo exhibitions at Antwerp’s Zeno X gallery, and the same year she also had a solo exhibition at M HKA’s predecessor organisation, the ICC (International Cultural Centre). She presented her first solo exhibition Nursing Care, in Melancholy Stupor at M HKA in 1999, followed more recently by her retrospective exhibition AMVK in 2018. Van Kerckhoven has also been active as an experimental musician in the band Club Moral along with Danny Devos, with whom she also published the magazine Force Mental.