Picture this: Dolores Bouckaert

Black Nights / Blue Words

The artistic versatility of Dolores Bouckaert manifests itself in various mediums, including video, theater, performance, photography, environments, and more. Themes such as beauty, intimacy, pain, melancholy, and loneliness intertwine as common threads throughout her work. In doing so, she consistently explores the boundaries between visual arts and theatre/film.

Dolores Bouckaert has been working on her project Black Nights / Blue Words for quite some time, with several diverse presentation proposals already showcased (at Vooruit Gent and Jan Dhaese Gallery Gent). Black Nights / Blue Words delves into the desire to achieve an intimate understanding of the other. She asked five men to lock themselves in a room for one long night. They were each filmed for 12 hours from two fixed camera positions. One camera provided a panoramic view of the room, while the second camera (overhead) focused on the bed. The sound was recorded using four different microphones. During those 12 hours, the men couldn’t see her, but she was in the adjacent room watching them via video monitors. A personal note for each man served as an introduction to their solitary night. Personal objects were scattered throughout the room. The artist’s relationship with the five men is diverse, but each holds a special place in her circle of friends and acquaintances. Dolores Bouckaert was interested in how they would cope with seclusion: how they move in the space, engage in their normal activities, seek rest, and ultimately surrender to sleep. The heart plays a significant role in the project. For each man, Dolores Bouckaert created a terracotta sculpture of a heart. When the men were asleep, she placed her heart in a meaningful location each time. It was a sign of her gratitude, a metaphor for what connects them.

For the presentation of her project at MDD, Dolores Bouckaert designed five different cabinets (one for each man). From the abundant visual and audio material, she selected a long video segment for each man that vividly represents his night in an intense or captivating manner. Using the filmed bed images, she created a montage vertically projected in the museum.

Artists Ben Benaouisse and Bernard Van Eeghem were two of Dolores’ guests in the room. She invited them again, this time to intervene within her installation at MDD. As a spectator, you become an intimate witness to each night. The desire and fascination that watching the images evoke transcend voyeurism, as you sense that it’s not just about what you see but more about the relationship between Dolores and each man, which never becomes physical in the visual material.