#51 - 28 mei 2022

Door het verlengde weekend ben ik helemaal in de war met de dagen en de tips een beetje uit het oog verloren.

Donderdagavond ging ik naar de opening bij Fred & Ferry van Thomas Verstraeten.

Thomas Verstraeten's first solo exhibition at Fred&Ferry is set up as a dialogue, or perhaps better, as a confrontation between two projects: 'Pierre Menards paradox' and 'Familiestraat’.
In September 2014, Thomas Verstraeten made Pierre Menard's paradox. For this, he built a copy of the Moroccan coffee house Tanger, situated diagonally opposite, in the exhibition space. The installation described the interior of the coffee house in reverse, as a place of here and elsewhere, familiar and strange, as a paradox.
For Familiestraat, he built an exact replica of his street in wood and cardboard in a large factory hall. Then, together with 250 local residents, he re-enacted an annual review of true events that happened in the Familiestraat in the bizarre year 2020.
In both projects, seemingly futile pieces of history are re-enacted with great care and precision by their original 'inhabitants'. Both projects take ordinary, everyday events as their starting point. They are pieces of history that are saved from being forgotten. According to the artist, every event, no matter how small or trivial, contributes substantially to those few events that do get a place in our collective memory.
"History is a substance that is manufactured of its own accord; if you turn away from the staccato of the headlines and listen very carefully, you will hear the infinitely slow grinding of the wheels, between which nothing is ever lost," Nooteboom writes in his Berlin Notes.

Fred & Ferry
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Art21 is een fantastische website met een oneindige hoeveelheid mini docu's waar kunstenaars praten over hun praktijk.

Hier Kiki Smith aan het woord:

“Basically, I think art is just a way to think,” remarks Kiki Smith, “it’s like standing in the wind and letting it pull you in whatever direction it wants to go.”
Adept in bronze, wax, textiles, and printmaking, the segment follows Smith on a journey through a diversity of narrative subjects including witches, saints, death, animals, family members, domestic objects, and dolls.
Smith explains her relationship to meaning in her work: “I’d rather make something that’s very open-ended that can have a meaning to me, but then it also can have a meaning to somebody else who can fill it up with their meaning.”

Art21

Vorige week vergat ik te melden dat Stijn Cole meedoet aan The Ballroom Project op Antwerp Art Weekend. Morgen dus nog een volledige dag om zijn werk te bewonderen.

Bij deze!

In Stijn Cole’s universe, themes like time and landscape painting are endowed with a renewed beauty that translates into a contemporary version of impressionism. 
Each new series of Stijn Cole’s works is connected with a specific period, walk, or journey, which gives it an almost documentary quality. 
Stijn Cole describes his contribution as modest, just a filter he puts on reality. 
But with the utmost precision and subtlety, he challenges the viewer to take on an active role. 
In this manipulative game, he entices the viewer to engage in an experience of intensity, space, and shape that will time and time again prove to be surprising. His newest works increasingly take the shape of installations, landscapes created by Stijn Cole that the audience is invited to wander around in.

Stijn op Antwerp Art