The Bee Who Forgot the Honey
12 — 24 November 2019
- Artists
- David Claerbout, Hans Op de Beeck, Jennifer Douzenel, Guido van der Werve, Taus Makhacheva, Paulo Arraiano, Serafín Álvarez, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Marcin Liminowicz, Justin Barton & Mark Fisher, Saïd Afifi, Jon Rafman, Mit Borrás, Michael Sailstorfer, Emilio Vavarella and Mario Santamaria
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This multiple and decentralized exhibition, spread across several spaces and locations in the city, offers a new approach to the notion of landscape based on a perspective that goes beyond the simple issues of representation, nature or the environment that surrounds us, portrayed as a mere container. It is an urban walk of sorts, indomitable and always incomplete, with ramifications and possible stops, each of which delves into the questions implicit in our modern notion of landscape in its own unique way.
To this end, its reflection starts from the notion of “inappropriability” developed by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in order to rethink the metaphysical idea of a world-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) that is transparent to the knowledge of mankind. Through a critique of the very status of the image – its ontological reality and its symbolic function -, the subversion of a merely reassuring narrative of Progress, or a return to a more existential and phenomenological temporality, the artists on display put forward a new, more spiritual, humble or affective way of Being-in-the-world, that is, entering into a relationship with the landscape, understood as that natural environment that man has often deemed to be a mere backdrop or a simple stage for humankind.
In the works of David Claerbout, Hans Op de Beeck, Guido van der Werve, or Michael Sailstorfer, for example, the landscape no longer appears as a setting or a horizon to be explored, as a whole that is alien to man or as a reserve of assets to be exploited, but as the symbol of the ontological significance of a state of the world (and of being), as a space, a thought that constantly eludes us, slipping between our fingers, inaccessible and untouchable, beyond the realm of use and utility in which we tend to categorize everything in this age of consumption and obsolescence.
Curated by Aurélien Le Genissel.
David Claerbout is one of the most innovative and acclaimed artists working in the realm of moving images today, his oeuvre exists at the intersection of photography, film and digital technology.Trained as a painter, he became more and more interested in time through investigations in the nature of photography and film. His works present profound and moving philosophical contemplations on our perception of time and reality, memory and experience, truth and fiction.Using pixel constellations, image sequences, light, speed, speech, music and ambient sound, installation environment and the technologies used to convey these, his strikingly sensual compositions elicit new modes of perceptual absorption, expectations, comprehension and memory. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally, most recently including: MNAC, Barcelona, and Schaulager, Basel (2017); Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2016); KINDL, Berlin (2016); Marabouparken Konsthall, Sundbybert, Sweden (2015); Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (2014); Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz, Germany (2013).
Last update: May 19th, 2017
Hans Op de Beeck (Turnhout, 1969) lives and works in Brussels and Gooik, Belgium. He has shown his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.
He produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards the man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder, silence and introspection.
Serafín Álvarez is an artist, researcher and educator. His work entails collecting images, organise them, relate them to one another, ruminate them: imagining other worlds using them as a starting point, building those worlds and contemplating them. These processes are usually motivated by a keen interest on how we relate to the unknown, how we study it and how we represent it.
Last update: November 11th, 2022
Mario Santamaria
- Artist, Participant
1985, Burgos
Mario Santamaría works across a wide range of media, frequently using photography, video, performance, websites and online interventions. In recent years his work focuses on tactics to embody distribution protocols, performing actions such as physically travelling to his website by repeating the data path; going for beers around the city as a Google algorithm or founding a tour operator based on the Internet physical infrastructure. His work has been shown among others in: ZKM Karlsruhe, WKV Stuttgart, MACBA Barcelona, CENART Mexico, Arebyte London, Les Rencontres d’Arles and C/O Berlin.
Last updated: 11th November, 2022
Artists: Jennifer Douzenel, Guido van der Werve, Taus Makhacheva, Paulo Arraiano, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Marcin Liminowicz, Justin Barton & Mark Fisher, Saïd Afifi, Jon Rafman, Mit Borrás, Michael Sailstorfer, Emilio Vavarella