K, a Society

Kafka's world

In K, a Society ten installations are brought together in one location. The only living character is a guide who leads the audience from one place to the other. K, a society shows facets of a society that is very similar to ours: a series of images in which trends present in our world are ‘translated’, enlarged or brought to the surface. These images are of characters we recognise from reality. Characters connected to figures who populate Kris Verdonck’s earlier work. There is a wall from which a large group of people stares at and laughs at us; we experience a slow, peaceful fall from the roof of a skyscraper to the ground; we see a businessman lying in the water holding on to his briefcase to stop himself from drowning; there are king-like creatures who sing Wagnerian arias about their own doom; there is a spectacular indoor firework display, and so on.

The title refers to the work of the Prague author Franz Kafka, who was the most important source of inspiration in the realisation of the project. It is not so much about Kafka’s stories or characters as about his ‘breath’, his world: a closed and incomprehensible stronghold, a tangle from which there is no way out, a life that satisfies the cast-iron logic of a nightmare. A sinister society in which man is always unsure what is going to happen next. A society which is like a bad dream from which you never know when, how or if you will awaken.