Hedwig Houben places herself as a maker in opposition to her practice. She literally engages, usually through videos and performances, in conversations with her work or allows certain objects to have conversations on issues like form, style, medium, quality and unicity. By doing so she not only questions herself as an artist but also art as such, and how it’s valuated.
Art works, or the elements that they consist of, become personae with characteristics that ly outside herself or that at least begin to live a life of their own and speak from their own formal, emotional or contextual properties. Through this ongoing discussion she exposes her own questions and uncertainties in her working process, but also some of the questions evoked by art and art history: what are the object’s value and status? What is an original and what a copy? When is something good or bad? A sucess or a failure?
