Jan Peeters
Visual artist and experimental filmmaker Jan Peeters (°1978) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.
In his artistic practice, Jan Peeters currently focuses on so-called ‘iconotextual’ works: he merges words (and more precisely, texts that are set typographically) and moving images (with emphasis on filmic images) to form visual-textual unities of content, which cannot be categorised as either pure image or pure text. In these ‘reading films’ he brings together the languages of literature and visual art, without focussing necessarily on certain implicit elements of mainstream film, such as narration, acting or characters.
He has taken part with his works in exhibitions and festivals in Belgium and abroad. His poetry films were selected at some major international poetry film festivals, such as ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition (Cork), Co-Kisser Poetry-Film Festival (Minneapolis), International Festival of Videopoetry by VideoBardo (Buenos Aires) and La Parola Immaginata by Trevigliopoesia (Italy).
Jan Peeters holds a master degree in Germanic Language and Literature at Ghent University (2000). Three years later he graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, after spending also half a year at La Villa Arson, École nationale supérieure d'art, in Nice, France. In 2006 he graduated as a Master of Fine Arts at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten (KASK) in Ghent. In 2014 he obtained a PhD at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (research unit Literary Studies: Literature and Culture) with his research on 'reading film' ('leesfilm' in Dutch).
Today, he is co-ordinating the master courses at Sint-Lucas in Ghent (LUCA School of Arts). He is also one of the driving forces behind Art Cinema OFFoff, a Belgian cinema for experimental film, based in Ghent. He conducted interviews and organized the program series 'This is not a script'.
