Biography
Brendan Michal Heshka holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Film (University of Winnipeg, Canada), a Master’s in Dirty Art (MDes, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam), and a certificate as an artistic researcher from A.PASS (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels). Heshka defines his work as post-post-conceptual art, interested in constructing spatial narratives that perform in reality but that simultaneously offer themselves as backdoor entrances into alternative realities, dimensions of fiction, the unconscious, the mystical, and alchemic.
Working in the context of the visual arts with a focus on performativity and scenography, Heshka’s work is made manifest through art exhibitions, objects, images, texts and performance. Canadian by origin, Heshka lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Artist statement
I see the artistic work I make as symptoms with deposits of meaning. As I allow these symptoms to manifest into art objects they are domesticated into a productive reality, the reality of art. They all contain something of me, they are signs, again symptoms of the things that make me, me. The art works all contain meanings, and mysteries that slowly oscillate between revealing and concealing themselves. Simultaneously, confessing and confusing the relationship with their producer, the identity of the artist contained within myself, my other self that is me, the Hegelian Beautiful Soul, the me in me, marked out by the limits of representation.
As artists in the contemporary field of art, we are constantly demanded to mediate our work. In fact this persistent requirement for mediation, meaning giving, and explanation, performs the same role as the ego. Our artworks always exist in a past, they are always facing the judgement of this voice of the ego, in this process we experience a separation from the actuality of the works, things that do in fact exist, spoken into materiality like language. It is not the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”, rather “it speaks” and there I am, I am artist, speaking in the language of things, there. see.
As artists in the contemporary field of art, we are constantly demanded to mediate our work. In fact this persistent requirement for mediation, meaning giving, and explanation, performs the same role as the ego. Our artworks always exist in a past, they are always facing the judgement of this voice of the ego, in this process we experience a separation from the actuality of the works, things that do in fact exist, spoken into materiality like language. It is not the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”, rather “it speaks” and there I am, I am artist, speaking in the language of things, there. see.
Published works
Conceptual Fine Art Magazine
︎︎︎ Read here
Masters thesis
︎︎︎ Read here
At the show with the artist: Brendan Michal Heshka’s psycho psychoanalysis of the musée fin de siècle in Brussels
︎︎︎ Read here
Masters thesis
An Alien Odyssey to Creative Freedom: Towards a Theory of Artistic Research; from the Abstract Maybe to the Concrete Real
︎︎︎ Read here
