Miet Warlop (°1978) is a Belgian visual artist born in Torhout. She lives and works between Ghent and Brussels. Miet Warlop holds a master’s 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. In the context of Lovepangs (Vooruit, 2005) she created the one-on-one performance Cherish the Cherries. From January 2006 until November 2007 Warlop was one of the six artists of DE BANK (Arts Centre CAMPO, Ghent), where she was working on her series of ‘Propositions’, named Big Heap / Mountain. In between, she was responsible for the set design for performances by Pieter Genard, Raven Ruëll, DitoDito-Jef Lambrecht, KVS (Brussels), Arts Centre Vooruit (Ghent) and Les Ballets C de la B (Ghent).

While she was touring the ‘Propositions’ all over Europe, she realised Springville, a fifty-minute game of chaos, expectations and surprises, in which scenography, costumes, props and characters are closely interwoven and merged together. Springville premiered in May 2009 at Arts Centre BUDA (Kortrijk).

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 the course of 2012-2013 Miet Warlop explored different possibilities with her Nervous Pictures and performances/interventions, through projects and commissions, both in a visual arts as in theatre context in/with Baltic Triennial (Vulnius), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Lisson Gallery (London), Southard Reid Gallery (London). In November 2012, as part of her four-year associated artist residency at Beursschouwburg (Brussels), she created the opening event of the season with the Alligator Project: a weekend of combined media and performances by different artists and musicians like Reggie Watts and Michael Portnoy, a project curated by Miet Warlop.

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 that took off to the grid. Also, Art Gallery Barbican (London) commissioned a performance as a part of the project Station to Station, hosted by Doug Aitken.

While touring her solo Dragging the Bone and celebrating the hundredth show of Mystery Magnet in Ghent, Porto and Bordeaux, she finishes the year by opening her first solo exhibition project in KIOSK Gallery (Ghent) titled Crumbling Down the Circle of my Iconoclasm.

In 2016 a new large scale stage work premiered – Fruits of Labor, a deep night choreographical concert performance, functioning as a painkiller for the world. Fruits of Labor premiered at KunstenFestivalDesArts (Brussels) in May 2016 and is still touring around the world.

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 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 and Mystery Magnet. 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 premieres in September 2018 at NTGent (Ghent). Warlop cooperates with author and curator Raimundas Malasauskas and musician Pieter De Meester.

Beginning of 2018 Miet Warlop creates 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.

In 2020 Miet Warlop / Irene Wool starts a collaboration with Frans Brood Productions and this results in the programmation of many performances, nationally and internationally. However, since the outbreak of Covid-19, only a few of the planned shows could be performed; the remaining dates have been moved to 2021 and 2022.

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.
Moreover, Miet Warlop / Irene Wool has developed the idea to create an online platform to share a live database with archive material with a glimpse into the daily artist practice.

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 / Irene Wool is at this moment working on Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV : One Song, as the fourth director to accept the NTGent commission. 

She is also researching on her new production, Delirium, in collaboration with Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Kaaitheater. Delirium will premiere in Spring 2024.