Charlotte Bouckaert studied sociology and photography, and completed a postgraduate degree in scenography and performance. She began her artistic career in photography but soon developed a resistant relationship with the static image. Questioning whether a photograph can behave performatively, she turned toward creating shows and performances.
Over the past twenty years, Bouckaert has built a distinctive artistic language at the intersection of visual art and live performance. By staging images as processes of transformation, she invites audiences to become aware of the impact of their own perception. Her work takes diverse forms, including performances, installations, shows, and videos.
Charlotte Bouckaert is artistically affiliated with Platform 0090, from where she develops many of her projects. Her work often arises from a fascination with art and artists. 11 SECONDS explored how we look at art, while You are an Object to me and THING depart from the tradition of still-life painting. These works have been presented at STUK, KVS, Playground Festival, Theater aan Zee, de Brakke Grond, Théâtre de Gennevilliers (Paris), Dasdas Theater (Istanbul), Kaap, Toneelhuis, Monty, C-TAKT Festival, CC De Spil, CC Gasthuis and CC Muze. Her installation works have also entered museum contexts: for example, THING (the museum version of You are an Object to me) was shown at STUK (Playground Festival), Ten Bogaerde Koksijde and Mu.Zee Ostend, and will be presented at Design Museum Ghent and KMSKA.
In 2026 Charlotte Bouckaert will premiere The More I See You (The More I Want You) (production Bronks) in which 15- to 18-year-olds create live self-portraits, group photos and snapshots on stage, exploring how young people present themselves in front of the camera. Later that year, Bouckaert will present I Never Looked Like That (Platform 0090 & KVS), in which she herself appears on stage, taking live photographs of her body that are instantly projected on screen.
While the first work focuses on how young people see and represent themselves, the second addresses how the female body is perceived and portrayed. Together, they form a diptych on identity, the gaze, and perception.
She is currently developing The Photographer Left, They Told the Truth, a triptych of installation-performances (BOX, HAND, PRINT) in which images emerge, transform and move. The work questions whether images ever truly come to rest, and will be presented at venues including Kunsthal Gent, Playground Festival (Leuven) and de Brakke Grond (Amsterdam).
Through her multidisciplinary practice, Bouckaert seeks to question and activate the act of looking: what do we see, and what remains unseen? How do we look, and why? Central to her work are the unexpected and the imaginative. “The greatest enemy of looking is thinking we already know what we are looking at.”
Choreografie van het stilstaand beeld - Tamara Beheydt about the work of Charlotte Bouckaert (NL)