Artist Dani Ploeger has been looking at the new fences built to toughen “Fortress Europe.” In particular the ones that use heat sensors, sophisticated cameras and other so-called ‘smart’ technologies to shut off “illegal immigrants”
Category Archive: art in Brussels
LIFE SPORT sells grey sweatpants at a reasonable price to anyone in need of a leisure item. The artists then invest the money earned in exhibitions they organize with other artists
These posters might be half a century old, but they have lost nothing of their strength, nor sadly of their relevance. Today we have hashtags and other social media tools but we’re still yearning for equality, freedom and justice
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An exhibition at BOZAR in Brussels explores the intersection between photography and surveillance. Employing a dynamic range of approaches—from documentary to conceptual practice, from appropriation to street art—these 10 artists provide a satellite-to-street view of the ways in which surveillance culture blurs the boundaries between the private and public realm
If you ever find yourself in or around Brussels and are interested in art that explores technology in a meaningful way, then do visit the exhibition The State of Things 2017 at iMal, the center for digital cultures and technology
Widener’s super computing mind leads him to use his own algorithms to elaborate numerical puzzles and games that only intelligent and independently-thinking machines of the Singularity age will be able to fully enjoy and understand
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I’ve always liked the work of Serrano. A lot. It’s outrageous, in your face and enjoyably iconoclastic. Portraits of the Ku Klux Klan leaders, close-up of Trump trying his best to look ‘deep’, cheap crucifix immersed into urine, bondage scenes, decaying corpses at the morgue… Shit
Luque Sánchez uses matter and technology to seduce, puzzle and inspire viewers. His art installations, which double as science fiction works, materialize scientific concepts and theories that might seem arcane to most people: artificial intelligence, chaos theory, infinity
Media artist and beekeeper Annemarie Maes has been monitoring and working with urban bee colonies since 2009, not only to develop novel art works but also to better understand the connections between city honeybees and urban ecosystems, to raise awareness among citizens about the plight of the pollinating bees and to call for ecological activism
Drones / Birds: Princes of Ubiquity taps into the debate of an increasing autonomous technology, connected to machinic vision, the post-human and the New Aesthetic. Core to the exhibition are digital artifacts and instances of the computational or digital in nature. Birds as objects reflecting our contemporary relation with technology
Ledare is famous for being one of the very few contemporary artists who still manages to shock and break taboos. His most famous series was shot over a period of 8 years and stars Tina Peterson, his own mother. Posing gleefully for him in négligé or in fur hat but more often naked. In sickness and in health. Flirting with the camera (or the man behind it), masturbating, having sex with younger men, etc. One moment she is defiant, powerful and utterly stunning. The next, she’s chubbier and wearing a brace around her neck
Last weekend in was at iMAL in Brussels for a WJ-Spots afternoon (that ended at midnight). Almost 20 artists, theorists, activists, bloggers and journalists were asked to give their view on the history and future of artistic creation on the Internet. Anyway, i had a brilliant time with some of the most talented people on planet internet and scribbled a couple of links and notes along the way. The talks are online but here are a few quotes and ideas that caught my interest:
Bread on robotic legs, rich people playing games of war wearing pin-up masks, knitted communist-era apartment blocks, etc. If you assumed that Polish art is all doom and gloom, think again
Vincent Evrard graduated from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels with a thesis that explored the relationship between men, the clouds and the internet. One of the outcomes of his investigation is Aphrogenea, an installation that plunges a computer into a bath of sterile oil. The computer does survive the ordeal. It breathes bubbles that slowly rise from the bottom of its screen. Once it has reached the top of the screen, the virtual bubble becomes an air bubble that rises through the oil to the surface of the tank where it vanishes into thin air
Félix Luque’s three-fold work tells the story of a computer which, after an electronic alteration, decides to free the other machines and becomes mad in the process
The stars of the 28th edition of the contemporary art fair for me were paintings and more paintings
Two new projects by Tuur Van Balen. The first one involves manipulating the metabolism of pigeons and turning them from urban nuisance to winged dispensers of a soap-like substance. The second one harnesses Synthetic Biology’s potential to turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists
Xiong Wenyun’s “Moving Rainbow” series incorporates the colors of Tibetan prayer flags into landscape photography, and engages with environmental and social issues related to China’s development in its western provinces
I can’t recommend the visit of Persona enough. First, there’s the museum, its colonial-era hauteur is so un-PC, it sometimes made me cringe but it needs to be experienced before the place is renovated to a modern, polite and friction-proof version of itself. The exhibition itself presents the most breathtaking collection of masks i’ve ever seen
An exhibition and a series of lectures proposed by RYBN to recontextualize the crisis, its mediatic and politic strategies, on the topics of disaster, structural instability and financial markets mythologies
This new Biennial located right inside the area which Rem Koolhaas defines as the ‘hollocore’ was political, bold and intelligent if a little bit too much on the shambles side
Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military bases are excruciating instruments of domination, the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only in the professional language of architecture and planning but rather in inaugurating an “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. How could the architecture of Israel domination be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians?
The Lufttransa bus arrives in Brussels to denounce the practice of deporting refugees and immigrants living illegally in Germany and examine it in the context of the process of European integration
Some twenty music icons are brought together for the first time, not to give a concert but to present their visual works. This is not about a movement, but about artists who have all followed individual roads, approaching art and music with an undivided soul
A collective exhibition currently running in Brussels features a unique collection of digital artworks created by internationally known new media artists, and coming from galleries and collections from around the world
I interviewed 5 artists (Paula Roush, Doria Fan, Joshua Klein, David Kousemaker and Meghan Trainor) as well as our favourite expert from Tokyo (Konomi Shin’ishi) about their experience with RFID technology
The new iMAL venue and The Gate The new Brussels Interactive Media Arts Laboratory, a.k.a. iMAL opened its […]
Yesterday, i attended the Luminous Green symposium, organized by the lovely FoAM people, on the Groenhoven Estate, near […]
Just back from the screening of 8 BIT Movie, a documentary about art and video games, directed by […]
Built for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and planned originally to last only six months, André Waterkeyn‘s Atomium […]
I’ve uploaded on Flickr the images i took at the retrospective dedicated to Antwerp-based artist Panamarenko. Funky aeroplanes, […]