Kristel van Issum
Kristel van Issum (Tilburg) shaped her work for 20 years as a choreographer with the famous Tilburg collective T.r.a.s.h., where she made films in addition to numerous performances.
Kristel is interested in ingrained role models, in the merging of incompatible identities. In her work, she magnifies everyday actions and explores how human beings are depicted in contemporary visual culture. Her main focus is the body, and how our bodies act as a kind of intermediary in the outside world, so to speak. Her idea is that identity is a fiction, an illusion. In our contemporary society, we can assume any identity we want.
After intensive discussions from 2016, the #Catalogue of Shadows I 2018 marked the start of its collaboration with DansBrabant. This performance installation consists of a series of seven filmed portraits of women and was first shown at Theatre Festival Boulevard.
In 2022, she made #Catalogue of Shadows II, again at Theatre Festival Boulevard and in 2023 at Park Tilburg.
Cooperation continues in the Document Series, a multi-year project in which Kristel uncovers new forms and meanings in different modules by finding leads in previous work.
Kristel van Issum's body and mind form one huge archive of images, memories, impressions, impulses; everything she has read, seen, felt and heard. This gigantic archive is also the source of new work, which is why you could call her work the epitome of recycling and sustainability. Each work gives rise to subsequent work. Always from the motivation to show, in bringing together beauty and ugliness, the imperfection of 'the stumbling body' and the struggle of the human spirit in relation to itself, the other and reality. Thinking in broad strokes, with an eye for detail, active and receiving at the same time.
