Miet Warlop (°1978) is a Belgian visual artist born in Torhout. She lives and works between Ghent and Brussels. Miet Warlop holds a master degree in Visual Arts from KASK, Ghent. For her graduation project Huilend Hert, Aangeschoten Wild, an ‘inhabited' installation consisting of six tableaux vivants and a crawling subject’, she won the Franciscus Pycke Jury Award and the residence prize for Young Theatre Work 2004.
Many other performances, actions and projects followed and in 2005 she premiered SPORTBAND / Afgetrainde Klanken a forty-minute performance, in which twenty people race against time through music and sports.
Miet Warlop moved to Berlin for three years to concentrate on her visual work and prepare a new piece called Mystery Magnet, which premiered at KunstenFestivalDesArts (Brussels) in May 2012. Mystery Magnet Won the Stuckemarkt Theatertreffen Prize at the Berliner Festspiele for its innovative form of theatre. Mystery Magnet has played more than a hundred times all over the world and was nominated for Theatertreffen Berlin for finding a new way of making stage-arts. Mystery Magnet is still touring all over Europe and beyond.
In 2014 Miet Warlop started her own legal structure Miet Warlop / Irene Wool. In October 2014 the first production Dragging the Bone premiered at Beursschouwburg (Brussels). Dragging the Bone is a solo performance on a sculptured world.
In 2015 Miet Warlop opened the festivities that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Beursschouwburg (Brussels) with Rocket. Also, Art Gallery Barbican (London) commissioned a performance as a part of the project Station to Station, hosted by Doug Aitken.
In addition to her performance work for theatre venues, Miet Warlop has created and presented an ever-growing cycle of visual art performances, interventions and live installations. Nervous Pictures has been presented in 2017 in KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Performatik (Brussels), among others.
In 2017 she opens the season at Arts Institute Vooruit (Ghent) with the monumental performance Amusement Park, and she was invited by BOZAR (Brussels) within the context of the Yves Klein retrospective exhibition to re-envision and re-stage her seminal work, Mystery Magnet, as well as to create the opening performance of the exhibition, HORSE, a man, a woman, a desire for adventure. During the closing ceremony of the Paul Bury exhibition the visual art intervention, The Board is presented.
Festival Actoral. 17 (Marseille) invites Miet Warlop for "L’Objet des Mots", which results in a new project Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break – a production that premiered in September 2018 at NTGent (Ghent). Warlop cooperates with author and curator Raimundas Malasauskas and musician Pieter De Meester.
Beginning of 2018 Miet Warlop created Big Bears Cry Too, a solo performance with Wietse Tanghe. This performance for all ages premiered at hetpaleis (Antwerp) in April 2018. Both performances are successfully touring since then. Together with Fruits of Labor and Mystery Magnet, no fewer than eighty-five performances were played in 2019 between Belgium and abroad: Switzerland, France, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Great Britain, Spain, Singapore and Canada.
During the Covid lockdown, Miet Warlop started a series of online episodes titled Slamming Doors: a sitcom format that will function as a pleasure platform for the artist practice, collaborations, sources, and open talks... A series of episodes has been produced to go against the age-old niche thinking about art and experiencing art, gradually gaining popularity, and transcend the live performance’s momentum.
In autumn 2021, Miet Warlop is revisiting the twelve-year-old piece Springville under the new title After All Springville. Warlop commemorates her much-loved piece in a new era and repositions the work within her oeuvre. The revival mixes an existing show (Springville) and an installation (Amusement Park) into a new whole and premiered in August 2021 at the Internationales Sommerfestival Kampnagel (Hamburg).
Miet Warlop is at this moment working on Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV : ONE SONG, as the fourth director to accept the NTGent commission. Like the previous parts of the series, ONE SONG will premiere at the prestigious Festival d'Avignon in July 2022.
- update March 2022