Dr. Jan Peeters

Visual artist and experimental filmmaker Jan Peeters (°1978) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

His artistic practice is characterized by multidisciplinarity: he draws, paints, writes, prints, sculpts, designs or films, with a special interest in transgressing media or genres. He often works at the fringes of media, but also of fiction and non-fiction, and of narrativity. Recurring themes have an existential nature: the landscape, (in)finitude, the human being as a measure of things, contingency.

He co-operates with other artists and writers for his documentary films (e.g. Sculture nel tempo (2020) with Dany Deprez) and poetry films (with Paul Bogaert, Bart Van der Straeten or Geert Ooms). These latter works are so-called ‘iconotextual’ works: words (and more precisely, texts that are set typographically) and moving images (with emphasis on filmic images) are merged to form visual-textual unities of content, which cannot be categorised as either pure image or pure text. In these ‘reading films’ the languages of literature and visual art are brought together, without focussing necessarily on certain implicit elements of mainstream film, such as narration, acting or characters.

Jan Peeters has taken part with his works in exhibitions and festivals in Belgium and abroad. His poetry films were selected at some major international poetry film festivals, such as ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition (Cork), Co-Kisser Poetry-Film Festival (Minneapolis), International Festival of Videopoetry by VideoBardo (Buenos Aires) and La Parola Immaginata by Trevigliopoesia (Italy).

He holds a master degree in Germanic Language and Literature at Ghent University (2000). Three years later he graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, after spending also half a year at La Villa Arson, École nationale supérieure d'art, in Nice, France. In 2006 he graduated as a Master of Fine Arts at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten (KASK) in Ghent. In 2014 he obtained a PhD at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (research unit Literary Studies: Literature and Culture) with his research on 'reading film' ('leesfilm' in Dutch).
Today, he is doing research and teaching in the bachelor and master courses in visual arts at LUCA School of Arts (campus Sint-Lucas in Ghent). He is also connected to Art Cinema OFFoff, a Belgian cinema for experimental film, also based in Ghent.

Expertise

• practice of fine art and experimental film
• word and image
• intermediality
• poetry film
• research in and through the arts

Education

• 'Word, Image, Narrative', 2nd Bachelor Illustration
• Atelier Illustration, 2nd Bachelor
• chairperson Atelier Illustration

Research (Research Unit Image)

• The Objects We Carry, the Memories We Share. PhD in the Arts by Nairy Eivazy (as supervisor)
• A Glittering. In a box. Somewhere. PhD in the Arts by Joris Perdieus (as co-supervisor)
• Sculture nel tempo. Philip Van Isacker's works in public space (documentary)
• Lyric Poem. A research on how the unique characteristics of lyric poetry can be expressed in the audio-visual medium. PhD in the Arts by Marina Kazakova (as co-supervisor)
• Drawing as a mourning love letter. PhD in the Arts by Ans Nys (as co-supervisor)
• This is not a script. Poëzie ontmoet film
• Sound Type
• Leesfilm. Oefeningen in intermedialiteit / A Reading Film. Exercices in Intermediality (PhD)

List of realisations and publications: Lirias