Guided tour

Ana Torfs was born in 1963 and lives and works in Brussels. Her diverse sources are viewed anew through the lens of the present. Ultimately, all we perceive are echoes of the original material: playful and poetic transpositions that give rise to shifts in meaning and interpretation. Torfs is interested in worlds that unfold through words, like the travelogue of Christopher Columbus, which she references in her phantasmagoria The Parrot & the Nightingale (2014); elsewhere she considers the official Latin names of 25 plants in Family Plot (2010), a series of six ‘wandering words’ in TXT (Engine of Wandering Words) (2013), or the multifaceted stories behind 20 synthetic dyes in [...] STAIN [...] (2012). The relationship between text and image plays a pivotal role in her oeuvre – as do all the associated processes of visualisation, interpretation, manipulation and translation. In her multi-layered installations, Torfs uses a wide range of media and materials such as slide projections, sound, film, text, video, photography, textiles, digital media, xerography, sculptural objects and prints.