“The plastic bag is a vessel for an ever-changing content”

Plastic bags permeate our lives on a daily basis. They fill our hands, cupboards, and garbage dumps, and they will most certainly outlive us. It is predicted that it will take approximately 500 years for a ‘disposable’ plastic bag to fully decompose. This ubiquitous, often-overlooked, common bag and its 500 year lifespan is a catalyst for Belgian artist, Heidi Voet to explore the notion of change in her first solo exhibition at BANK.  Through flags, figurative sculptures, and masks over 30,000 plastic bags becomes both the medium and means for Heidi Voet to revisit the past 500 momentous years of human civilization.  

Laboriously weaved out of colored plastic bags and hanging in the main exhibition space are flags of countries that no longer exist. Within the life span of a disposable plastic bag hundreds of nation states have formed and collapsed, changed, and reconfigured. In a world where the history of war and strife is predicated on nationalism Heidi Voet’s colorful flags examine the transient and impermanent nature of so-called national identity.

Amongst these flags are what looks like tribal masks, also made from weaved plastic bags, and displayed on wooden pedestals. While the bag transports items from one state to the next-consumable to consumed, store to home-tribal masks are often used in rites of passage from one state to the next-boyhood to man, life to death; and as the plastic bag acts as a skin around the contents inside, masks disguise the wearer’s identity, enabling them to exhibit behaviors outside social conventions. 

In tandem with objects fabricated from bags Heidi Voet presents photographs of different fruits whose skins have been exchanged with others. This comical series, while echoing the skin of the bags, relates to the fantasy of longing to be the other, to assimilate, and to fit in with pre-existing norms. Voet interchanges peels from different fruits as a way to emphasize the destabilizing effects of global trade on the provenance of these fruits. 

Heidi Voet repeatedly conflates the historical with the mundane, the universal with the personal, in a spirited way. She positions the plastic bag as a shifting actor in her work to emphasize the notion of impermanence. Her whimsical and quotidian choice of materials follows her earlier work where Voet imbues common, overlooked objects with new value and meaning - through the simple act of making and playing.

HEIDI VOET (b. 1972, Belgium) one of the most provocative female voices working in China, splits her time between Shanghai and Brussels. Her artistic enterprise can be characterized by a wondrous engagement of everyday life and materials. Her work has been shown at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai and is on permanent display at K11, Shanghai. She has also shown at MoCA Shanghai, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, L&M Arts, Los Angeles and IT Park, Taipei.