MELTDOWN - Marilyn Minter

I co-produced MELTDOWN with TICK TACK and edited of this monumental, site-specific work by Marilyn Minter, projected onto the cooling towers of Vilvoorde during HORST Arts & Music Festival. Measuring 80 meters high and 40 meters wide, the projection offered a unique experience of cinematic art.

Minter, one of the most provocative and influential artists of our time, is known for her subversive explorations of beauty, power and desire. For MELTDOWN, created exclusively for HORST, I edited a new video work that melts her visual language from across her films into an entirely new piece, combining adaptations of her existing video works with unseen and unpublished footage. Her seductive yet subversive imagery takes on a new, spatial form.

The work connects to the festival’s exhibition theme, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” inspired by Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem and its reflection on nature’s indifference to human desire and destruction. In this context, Minter’s work becomes a confronting mirror: it seduces with beauty, but drips with decay. Her lush, hyperreal imagery shows the paradox of desire, how we are drawn to what ultimately undermines us.

The projection, realised with Beam Inc. and 3Made AV, used seven state-of-the-art projectors with a combined 350,000 lumens, turning the cooling tower into a pulsing beacon of light.

It was a true honor to melt Marilyn Minter’s fantastic visual language from across her films into an entirely new piece, and reforge it for specifically this site-specific installation.