Clara Begliardi Ghidini
Lives and works in Antwerp
Clara Begliardi Ghidini is an audiovisual artist and curator whose work moves between moving image, sound, installation, and live performance. Her practice is a sustained inquiry into perception: how we perceive and how we are perceived, and the charged threshold between our material and metaphysical existence. She is drawn to the intangible registers of experience, sensitivity, vulnerability, and attention that pass largely unnoticed in contemporary life, and to the ways an image or a sound can hold them still long enough to be felt.
Working from personal writing, recorded fragments and found or archival footage, she composes audiovisual works through layering and juxtaposition, setting contradictory elements against one another to unsettle rather than to explain. She aims to make an audience feel something before it understands it, to offer a sensation rather than a narrative to be immediately recognised. In Body Language, a video mapping installation, she turns this attention onto the gaze itself, and in particular the male gaze, examining how looking operates when we are not conscious of where our attention rests. Earlier works such as Numb, which merges her own footage with Len Lye's Tusalava (1929), and Absent Presence of a Present Awareness move through melancholy, fear and estrangement as states that resist description and are, for that reason, worth dwelling in.
For Begliardi Ghidini, how a work is presented is inseparable from what it means. She treats the physical encounter, the surface a projection meets, the space a body moves through, as part of the work rather than its frame. This concern increasingly draws her toward the archive, understood not as a record to be preserved but as living material to be reactivated in the present. In Performing the Archive at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, she reanimated the museum's Bits and Pieces collection through live editing and VJing, and the same instinct runs through her curatorial work, including Rewind, Replay: Vidéographie at argos in Brussels, where a pioneering television archive was returned to collective, public life.
Clara Begliardi Ghidini is an audiovisual artist, curator and researcher of Italian background, based in Belgium. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts with First Class Honours from Arts University Bournemouth and an MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam.
