Dr. Isolde Vanhee

  • Research unit:
    Image
  • Research topics:
    cinema and the visual arts, painting, experimental film,
    slow cinema, essay film, artistic authorship, genre,
    the ordinary, narrative, myth, fiction, writing, script
    criticism, ethics / aesthetics, word / image, imagination / reflection

Isolde Vanhee (°1976) studied Art History and obtained a PhD in Political and Social Sciences. In her research she pays special attention to the pictorial, narrative and tactile relationships between film and the visual arts - painting in particular. Filmmakers often have their eyes fixed on the other arts, and likewise, visual artists let themselves be inspired by the moving image. A second research interest focusses on artistic authorship, related to questions on visual signature, the autonomous and the collective, ambiguity, inspiration, engagement, narrative, the cliché, the ordinary, genre, myth, (auto)fiction, and also and especially the tension between a more aesthetic or ethical understanding of the classical notion of authorship. Finally, a third research perspective comprises the passages and exchanges between word and image, reading and looking, writing and imagining, creation and reflection. This focus within her research has emerged from her own writing practice, but also through her collaborations with artists who develop text as an alternative trajectory next to or within their visual work. Linked to these research perspectives, she currently supervises several PhDs in the arts, e.g. on collective and engaged authorship within painting practices, on the shared space between film and photo book, on ‘absence’ as an author’s strategy in comics, and on the relation of artistic performances and scripts to political and social acts of resistance.

Events and projects by Dr. Isolde Vanhee