Gender Talk: Unspoken / Outspoken
GENDER EMANCIPATION | 2016
Installation & ongoing series
Discipline: Monumental total installation / Interactive installation
Context: Part of the large-scale factory installation 'Identity Rooms, Walking into my Artwork, scale 1/1' (2015-2019)
Methodology: Research-based practice / Socially engaged art (Social practice)
Concept & Vision
Gender Talk: Unspoken / Outspoken is a museum-grade, monumental total installation functioning as an open space designed to radically open up the urgent public debate surrounding broader gender issues. The work was created exactly 10 years ago, in 2016, as a specific 'Gender Room total installation' within the large-scale factory installation 'Identity Rooms, Walking into my Artwork, scale 1/1' (2015-2019), out of the profound conviction that every individual has the right to their own identity and their own safe space.
In the socio-cultural climate of the time, the word ‘Gender’ was by no means a mainstream term; it was rarely used in popular media, and a deep societal discomfort and an enforced silence surrounded the entire issue (Unspoken). The project stood as a groundbreaking, innovative, and avant-garde intervention that resolutely broke open prevailing taboos: from the necessity of women's emancipation and the fight against partner violence (against both women and men), to homofobia, child abuse, and violence targeting trans individuals and all genders within the LGBTQIA+ community.
To bring these heavy voices forcefully to the fore (Outspoken), the themes were deliberately approached with a playful angle and a sharp, witty twist. Not a political pamphlet, but the power of a light-hearted counter-play. This was a deliberate, barrier-breaking strategy: by welcoming the audience in an accessible, almost cheerful manner, the threshold surrounding this unfamiliar and uncomfortable topic was dismantled.
Visitors became far more receptive and open to engaging in genuine dialogue. From this welcoming opening, the experience could organically shift towards the serious and raw reality of the matter. Rooted in a long-term, research-based practice, this socially engaged work shatters the silence surrounding abuse and physical or psychological violence across all relationships, orientations, and genders. It opens up a necessary and activist discourse on safety, power structures, and equal representation.
Spatial Design & Materiality
The physical setup was concretely constructed as a 'Room', a tangible space within the Identity Rooms. It forms a flexible, museum-grade capsule conceived not to be static, but to grow organically according to the specific space in which it stands and the ongoing evolution in time surrounding these issues. Whereas it was originally created to break through an urgent silence, the work reacts today to shifts in societal acceptance and the current debate. It is an environment where the visitor can actually step inside, absorb the entirety of the space, and directly engage in confrontation and active dialogue with other visitors. It is only when the playful element recedes that the work organically transitions into the raw reality.
The work's materiality plays a vital, articulate role. The tactile dimension of the materials used—the raw structures and the spatial constructions—possesses its own active agency. Rather than standing as merely decorative elements within the space, these components claim their own physical presence and guide the sensory and emotional journey of the visitor.
Interaction & Visceral impact
The installation is built on the fundamental premise that the artistic quality and the visual power of an artwork must be at least equal to—if not many times greater than—the heavy thematic weight underneath. In socially engaged art, it is an absolute rule that the subject matter must never be used as artwashing. Only through an uncompromising mastery of visual materials and a spatial practice does the gravity of the cargo remain intact, allowing the autonomous visual language to retain its eloquent power. The work refuses to default into a pure political pamphlet or a didactic gesture; an important social issue is not weaponised here as a superficial lampoon filled with one-liners.
The arrangement within the Identity Rooms functions as an interactive installation that is only fully completed by the physical presence, movement, and action of the visitor. Through the synthesis of tactile materials, raw textual fragments, and physical barriers, an environment is generated that leaves a profound, visceral impact; a deep, instinctive gut feeling that registers long before the intellect can fully analyse the heavy weight of the themes. The artwork achieves a necessary, powerful disruption of our societal gaze. The installation thus functions as a deeply felt, monumental artwork that compels the spectator into a substantial and respectful dialogue.
©2016-2026 Hilde NIJS. All rights reserved.
STOP WAR
"Concepts of Humanism"
The work of Belgian artist Hilde NIJS, entitled "Concepts of Humanism” whose practice includes series of drawings, paintings, mixed techniques, digital art, collages, sculptural ceramics, installations and sceneries, 3d ArtPen Sculptures and comprise many new works from her recent series Messengers of the Unconscious, The Riddle of Thinking Humanity, Human versus AI Machinery etc. Inspired by her own research on many subjects and books of Hannah Arendt, Freud's topographical model of the mind, Marcel Broodthaers and his Institutional Critique, Word and Image, art world role playing etc., the provocative art of Joseph Beuys and his extended definition, in which the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape society and politics, the Belgian philosopher Leopold Flam and many more, Nijs' art should be thought as some sort of wake up call for a new world and absolutely something to reflect on.
On her canvases, Hilde NIJS writes texts, messages and words as a result of her research study, also she selects the contemporary media, news headlines, advertisements, etc. and drops this all into a dialogue with each other, with history and with her own imagination such as a new world who comes alive on the surfaces consisting of layers deposits on each other. Inspired by Palimpsest, the preparing surfaces are defined as a manuscript that has been modified or changed but that still has traces of its original writing and as the world is constantly changing, our society as such can be viewed as a frequently altered palimpsest. All those elements are the raw materials necessary for the new and better world she wants to create for the survival of mankind. Regarding the ideological underpinning of her methodology, she describes the process of layering, printing, scribing, drawing, painting, scraping, erasing, dripping as a “necessary act of renewing,” an overflow of matter, sources, fragments, drawings, patterns and symbolism who allows the viewer to assemble their own moral view on society.
The Human Condition. From the series "HUMAN MACHINERY"
Artificial Intelligence. Human as a machine, the machine as a human.
HUMANS, NOT MACHINES, CREATE MEANING!
In the term "Artificial Intelligence (AI), the word Intelligence is just a metaphor - 2022
Analytical preliminary study of the human body.
An architectural plan for the human body to build the human such as a machine
or the machine such as a human.
Analytische voorstudie van het menselijk lichaam.
Een architecturaal bouwplan voor de mens als machine of de machine als mens - 2022
The Human Condition. From the series "HUMAN CONNECTION"
The world would not exist without the human activity which produced it.
No human life is possible, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness,without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
Conversation and communication are both essential ingredients of connectedness - 2022
ART COnnects
La capacité sphérique se connectant à la manche
The Human Condition. From the series 'The Riddle of Thinking Humanity'
Acryl painting on Canvas 080x060