— Ria Pacquée
Ria Pacquée (b. 1954) lives and works in Antwerp.
She gained international recognition in the 1980s with a performance series featuring her self-conceived characters, Madame and It. By infiltrating reality through these personae, she conducted an artistic investigation into the thin line between fiction and documentary. In more recent works, she focuses on photographic and video productions, but her experiences as a performance artist continue to play a crucial role in her process.
As a spectator of public life in her photographs and videos, and as a participant in her performances, ‘the street’ becomes Ria Pacquée’s domain — the living setting where she ‘rambles’ and discreetly records events from her unique point of view. Themes such as rituals, the ‘nonsense’ of religions, anonymous city wandering, and the collection of accompanying sounds and images — a recreation and appropriation of reality through the extraction of details from their everyday context — are recurring elements in her work. But much is also left to chance.