Maarten Seghers

Maarten Seghers makes objects, installations, performances and music. He’s a member of Needcompany since 2001. In addition to his unmistakable presence as a performer in the work of Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey, his compositions make a substantial contribution to their productions.

In 2006 Maarten Seghers set up OHNO COOPERATION in association with the artist Jan Lauwers and the musician Elke Janssens. Together, they create performances, video works, installations and music. OHNO COOPERATION also invites other artists and musicians to join, and presents these joint ventures in series of international exhibitions and concerts.

In his solo, ‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT DO YOU MEAN AND OTHER PLEASANTRIES’ (2014) he smartly and inimitably exposes art practices with apparent absurdity and with beauty and hilarity ploughed through the inevitability of our woes. This feast of feelings contains a human life full of love and tragedy. For this production he was nominated for the 2015 Prix Jardin d’Europe for choreographers in Vienna.

His sculpture ‘Fountain (Late-Pornographic Balance) I’ (2010) is in the permanent collection of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais.

In the performance ‘O or The Challenge Of This Particular Show Was To Have Words Ending In O’ (2016) Seghers confronts himself with the artists, musicians and dancers Fritz Welch, Simon Lenski, Nicolas Field and Mohamed Toukabri, for whom he wrote an invocatory song about the noisiness of comforting.

The art practice of Maarten Seghers emerges from the desire to escape any form of definition, to refute and contradict any sort of stigmatisation. In his most recent production ‘Concert by a Band Facing the Wrong Way’ (2018) Seghers does not offer fine stories or seductive illusions, but grasps the link with the audience in other ways. He understands the art of welcoming confusion and embracing chaos.