Warm up at WARP

Off to Flanders we went on Sunday to take the chance to see the current exhibition Verknipt at WARP contemporary art platform and meet its director and curator Stef van Bellingen with whom studioOne did its wonderful cooperation last November in Vienna with the exhibition at Krinzinger Projekte and a whole week of frame program for the participating artists … it is such a pleasure to finally get to know WARP on-site in Sint Niklaas.

WARP is located in the center of St. Niklaas in an awesome 19th century building with an 20th century annex - it is a former artist´s residence now dedicated to the promotion of Belgian as well as international artists. They organise exhibition with a diverse and in-depth frame program on-site but also internationally via artists villages on diverse cities.
The space is huge with many possibilities of presenting, working, doing workshops, lectures and all kinds of events.

For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.

Can´t pronounce that institution's name ...

… last Thursday I stopped by at the famous Beursschouwburg - for a newcomer in town an extremely active, vivid multi-disciplinary event hub with tradition - to see the opening of Margarita Maximova exhibition You’re on your own and all over the place … it was surprisingly cool! Have a look on the pics …

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… the video-sound installation was presented in a way open to the street what a I liked a lot. For the opening eve with an opened glass front that the audience was inside and outside of the display. More than inviting to dive deeper into the screened topic …

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For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.

WIELS presenting their new AIR

That was really a cool event on Tuesday at WIELS, the presentation of the new residents - WIELS has an extraordinary residency program with about nine studios where changing local as well as international artists work up to months - I highly appreciate the idea that the new residents at the beginning of their working period get the opportunity to introduce themselves, their ideas or artistic approaches with a 10 minute presentation to a public audience. And the auditorium was packed with people who were eager to get know the artists.

Seven residents (among whom also the Austrian artist Nikolaus Gansterer) talked about what they are doing and shared some impressions of there ongoing projects in their individual style and afterwards the audience was invited to get into touch with the artists informally at the bar …
The current AIR are quite diverse from their artistic practice and their backgrounds …

For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.

French - I - ssss*

On Monday evening I was testing my poor, but growing French knowledge via attending the Didier Eribon à propos de `Retour à Reims´ at KAAITHEATER - a great institution, which promises to offer quite a lot and highly diverse program. This eve is the season’s kick-off with a series of #conversations To Authenticity … and beyond! where the invite artists and intellectuals to talk about their approaches to increasingly exploited word and its implications.
After missing Eribon’s visit to Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts a few months ago I took the chance to listen to him at KAAI. At least I’ve read the book by Eribon - so I’ve been astonished how much I understood from the talk he had with the journalist Béatrice Delvaux from Le Soir. They focussed their conversation on the discourse around the class systems and its limits and shifts… How is it possible that former French communists now vote for the far right Le Penn for instance?
It was a big pleasure to attend this evening and I am very much looking to the next event at KAAI.

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Oh-Oh-Opening

After another two exhibition openings in more and less contemporary art I am looking forward to check out activities from another field.
Well, Richard Long’s exhibition at Foundation CAB, by the way Long’s first presentation in Belgium after about 40 years, might attract many people and has an prestigious outreach, but I experienced the opening as quite boring, decorative and a meeting point for the chicaria. The building of CAB in the heart of Ixelles is a fantastic - 1930s style Art Deco architecture - end opens up many opportunities for artists (they focussed on minimal art). Also the presentation of four of Long´s stone works in the main room is quite appealing from an aesthetic angle, but I didn’t like the combination of that with his poster works.

And there was the opening of Teresa Cos exhibition The Measure of disorder at ARGOS, Center for art and media, last Saturday. One again an institution in an great building with multiple possibilities not only to research in their archive but also present various kinds of projects. Even though the topic of the exhibition portraying certain aspects of Ludwig Boltzmann’s life and therefore is strongly linked to Austria, I couldn’t really connect to the professionally presented two channel video and sound installation. When I see results of artistic research presented like that I often ask myself where is the line between research, documentation and art? Why do they choose this way of presenting? It’s a very personal view, but I see neither the artwork nor the scientific representation of the topic.

Still from Teresa Co’s projection

Booming Brussels?

Within the framework of Brussels Gallery Weekend I attended a talk staging a topic which is my topic at the moment of leaving my country to get to know whats going on here:
Booming Brussels . On the panel - Zoë Gray (curator at WIELS), Anne Vierstraete (Director of ART Brussels), and Harlan Levey (Galerist), moderated by the art critic Sam Steverleynck (second from left on the picture beneath).
- well, I´ve to confess that the thesis that a place is vibrant, developing and trendy with new discoverings on the artist´s heaven might be an assumption every minor city is stating mediawise during events like a gallery weekend. The director of an commercial art fair and a galerist on a panel also won’t make bad add for the locality for their businesses. Still, a perfect event for me to dive deeper into that question of why Brussels.
During the talk I heard several points and arguments which underline the growing importance and influence of Brussels as an important center of not only dance, performing arts, but also fine arts in the last 10 to 15 years like the geographical situation of the city, which makes it possible to easily work on projects in several countries, or the internationality also through its status as center of the EU, but the experts also formulated facts which I start to feel and understand gradually: in 1986 there has been no single museum dedicated to modern or contemporary art in town, then 11 galerist gathered together and started a kind of an alliance which in 1996 ended up in the Art Brussels. The most crucial point for the development into a more vidid not only commercial but also a off-scene, diversity of artists and institutions definitely has been the opening of WIELS Centre for contemporary Art about 10 years ago. Further, the diversity in this comparatively small city is huge; it’s easy to navigate. The speakers emphasised the high quality of life and the accessibility of people here seems to be unique, it´s easy to meet people as they are not snobby - certainly a fact that I till now can underline. Harlan Levey stated that all these are characteristics suited to art.
Zoë Gray, originally from Great Britain, reported something highly interesting: she has been working in The Netherlands for several years, with the shift towards right politics she experienced more and more hostility towards art and therefore moved to Brussels…
But they were also coming up with aspects I´ve not thought of so far. For instance the theory of the “absence of the state” - on the one hand an advantage, as you are free to produce and show more self-driven, but on the other hand sometimes certain financial and symbolic support is as well absent. The division of the Flemish and the Francophone is stated to be so strong that it leads to a division within the fields. One artist recently also told me that you kind of have to decide when you settle down in Brussels as an artist - do you want to work with the Flemish or the Francophone institutions … that seems to be a pity as exactly this diversity enriches this place and makes it so strong otherwise.
Altogether, it was a quite balanced and in depth talk - it raised several points which I want to check out further within the upcoming months.

*experiment*

It´s such an honour to be free to reflect and write about the fields I am working in for a period with an undefined aim. It´s kind of beaming myself out of the business and gain new insights. And, the most important aspect - I don´t restrict it to one field; Visual art might be crucial, but I am not less interested into performing art, theatre, experimental stuff, local projects with a smaller outreach and above all transcultural approaches … let´s see what I´ll discover.

For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.

Jump into BXL Gallery Weekend 2018

After settling down as a family in a new country, a new city, neighborhood, what is a better kick-off for diving into the local art scene than the Brussels Gallery Weekend which each year starts the season after a long summer. The Gallery Weekend in September and the Art Brussels in April are kind of the focus points in the yearly calendar of visual art here. Not only the big commercial galleries and big museums are orienting their exhibitions towards those events but also the off-scene is more than active in showing what´s going on in their spaces, with their residents, what projects are going on etc.

CLEARING

View from WIELS building

Works by René Daniëls

René Daniëls and me

For me personally it was a great pleasure to visit CLEARING Gallery Brussels for the first time as I know CLEARING from New York where the run an quite exciting space in Brooklyn - same as in N.Y.C. CLEARING Gallery is near my neighborhood here in Brussels. The space is huge with an impressive architecture, perfect to display the works by Jean-Marie Appriou. By the way, the also represent Bruno Gironcoli - would be amazing to see his works there.

Well, highlight of the opening evening of course was the opening of René Daniëls exhibition Fragments from an Unfinished Novel at the fantastic WIELS. I was quite honoured to get to know the artist, whose works I´ve also seen in New York, personally - his œvre is impressive and touching.

Vanderborght Building

Performance by Joris Van de Moortel

have a look at the spectators

Exhibition view at C5

Then there was Vanderborght Building that weekend. Three floors present exhibition like Generation Brussels which to me unfortunately was not appealing. And, there was A performance Affair — a kind of performance festival within the Gallery Weekend. Informally opened by a performance of Joris Van de Moortel and his team. I´ve to confess that the sound of that happing at 11 am in the morning, in this architectural environment took over everything and didn´t really make it possible for all the other scheduled artist to start their performances.

For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.

Brussels - where a dance is a dance*

The 18th of August 2018, Austria, Styria´s countryside - where a dance is not a dance. It´s a good day to leave this rapidly turning more and more right and fascist country for a while in order to gain new inspiration, ideas and approaches for the transcultural work in contemporary art and performance.
We´ve decided to come to Brussels - the informal capital of Europe.
Never before in my life I felt more European than in these times. I´ve always believed that “European” would be a term, too narrow and restricting. I´ve prefered “citizen of the world” but living on a continent where nationalist thinking is spreading out at an immense speed refacing the idea of EUROPE seems to be striking.
”Why Brussels?” everybody keeps asking. Back in New York 2015/16 while working at the ISCP N.Y.C. I got to know the Italian artist Francesca Grilli who then just moved to Brussels. She made me curious about it, and highly recommended me to check that city out artwise. In the last two years I went there several times, worked with local and international artists of different fields, in Belgium as well as in Vienna. Hence, I got more curious. And, after a few years of intense work in Austria I took the liberty to step out of our life defining system, the structures of daily routine and see how all that works in another European country. We want to get to know this city and it´s surrounding far beyond its EU status.
Last but not least, Robert Menasse´s fantastic book Die Hauptstadt was more than convincing that it must be Brussels, where I now moved to for at least a year with my partner Florian Nitsch and our two kids. We want to get to know this city and country with its highly pluralistic society far beyond its EU status. Let´s find out what a dance is here meant to be*

I am pleased
to share
this blog on

the
brussels
ART
project

with you*

fariba*
september 2018

For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.