Edith Dekyndt: Notes on What is What at Marian Goodman Gallery

Edith Dekyndt was born in Ieper, Belgium, in 1960 and lives in Brussels. Working across video, sculpture, installation, drawing, sound and performance, she applies physical and chemical processes to materials so that the passing of time, light and space becomes visible. Her record includes the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), solo shows at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection (2023), and Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2025). Notes on What is What is her first solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, on view from September 10 to October 24, 2026, across the north and south galleries on the second floor at 385 Broadway.

The show takes its starting point from Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island (1962), which imagines a society sheltered from the forces shaping the rest of the world. Dekyndt reads the island as a place of condensation: with clear boundaries, the circulation of matter, stories and practices can be observed without being simplified. Two islands anchor the exhibition. On Fogo Island, off Newfoundland, where she was an artist in residence in 2024, she met a community building an economic and cultural model around reciprocity between land, residents and art. Ibiza offers a different insularity, a geological and symbolic pull that has drawn artists, musicians, alternative communities and club culture for centuries.

The works carry traces of both journeys. Fishing ropes from Fogo Island, fused with glass, sit in vitrines as Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic and Neritic. Sculptures pair olive, pine, balsa, carob and petrified wood, or sheepskin, with algorithmically generated 3D-printed extensions. Wisdom of the Other Shore, a 3D print in sand, evokes a mirage or lost utopia. The Water Sizzling at the Prow, a woven tapestry (232 x 334 cm) based on a boat carpet found on rocks at Fogo Island, extends the seafaring theme, while Underground Santa Agnès de Corona, a 450 x 315 cm fabric, records the months it spent buried in the ground on Ibiza.

Animal Methods (2024), a video, grew from Dekyndt's research into invasive species and native fauna on Ibiza. A snake's shed skin flutters as a flag, set against the peaceful meaning of a white flag, and the work considers how animal and human behavior can be interchanged. Other pieces include It Could Be Very Fresh and Clear, a shelf of beach-collected chemical waste preserved like stones, shells or corals; A Barrage of Blue and Sulphur Butterflies, a box holding accumulated butterfly melanin; and glazed and cracked ceramics.

Linking the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the works speak to one another without hierarchy. Dekyndt does not try to depict these places; she aims to make perceptible the subtle forces that join materials to histories and objects to the forms of life they support. Her work will also appear at Bozar, Brussels, from October 2026 in a show pairing it with garments from the Balenciaga archive. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm.