Tigers, spirits, stones is an artistic representation of gender-based violence against women and gender-non-conforming people. Through theoretical and practical research –  through encounters, testimonies, conversations, interviews, reading, writing and feeling, Sarah Vanhee explore artistic formats that  express the lived and structural violence, that (re)program individual and collective bodies, minds and reactions, that transform the ways we think of justice – to challenge the current structures and cultures that keep the patriarchal violence going. The research is victim-centered and challenges the mutism from the side of the aggressors.

During her residency at BUDA, she is exploring theoretical and artistic work on gender-based violence. At the same time, she is recording testimonies and stories at the request of victims/survivors, and conducting interviews with various practitioners in the field who are working on the same subject.

Sarah Vanhee (BE)

Sarah Vanhee (°1980, Ostend) is an internationally renowned artist, performer and author, whose work has been shown in major performing arts contexts for the past fifteen years, as well as in the visual arts, film and literature. Vanhee is known for her transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral work and for inventing ever new, original art forms, mostly in a dilettant manner. Her art is driven by radical imagination, which leads to the creation of radical new fictions, or the realization of radical interventions in reality. In addition, art is an instrument for her to bring underexposed narratives and non-dominant voices to the foreground.

Vanhee travels in between public space and institutional art field. She worked in prisons, private living rooms, open fields, theatres, on public canvases, in corporate meeting rooms, etc. Vanhee believes that art belongs to everyone, and everyone can be an artist.

She has been a guest at BUDA Kortrijk before, with The Great Public Sale of Unrealised but Brilliant Ideas (an auction for unused ideas), Turning Turning (a choreography of thoughts), Lecture For Every One (a lecture she gave unsolicited to the police intervention team, Voka, Rotary, etc.) and at NEXT festival with Oblivion (a performance around the collected waste from one year far away).

While strongly embedded locally, Vanhee’s work has been presented widely internationally (in diverse contexts such as KFDA (Brussels), FTA (Montreal), Museo de Reina Sofia (Madrid), Festival Actoral (Marseille), Jihlava IDFF, Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Centre Pompidou (Metz), iDans (Istanbul), Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse), Wiener Festwochen, etc.) Her work has been part of European networks such as ACT, APAP, House on Fire and Next Step. Since 2023, she has been collaborating with HIROS.