The exhibition at FOMU in Antwerp is so good that even i, the only person on Earth stupid enough to profess a total indifference for space travel, decided it was worth coming back to it with a blog review
Category Archive: art in Antwerp
An exhibition that brilliantly puts the dance party culture of the 1990s into a neat museum package
Show Us The Money takes you on a journey to the world’s off-shore tax havens and corporate financial nerve centres. FOMU provides a glimpse of the structures that impact on all of us but which are themselves practically invisible. Three projects use very different artistic strategies to expose this global issue
advertising
Following the death of industrial Europe, rave emerged as Europe’s last big youth movement. This book considers the social, political and economic conditions that led to the advent of rave as a ‘counterculture’ across Europe, as well as its aesthetics, ideologies and influence on contemporary art and beyond
This piece of sound equipment emits low frequency infrasound waves, which causes those in its path to release the contents of their bowels—or more colloquially, to “shit themselves”. This kind of sound cannon has its roots in sonic weapons first developed by the Nazis for the purposes of crowd control, and purportedly also by the French authorities during the Paris riots of 1968
Panamarenko, the artist and inventor who builds zeppelins, mechanical chickens, flying backpacks, flying saucers, robots, submarines and other machines designed to travel over land, under water and in outer space, is having a big and rather wonderful retrospective at the M HKA, in his home town of Antwerp
social
Over the past 5 years, Nick Hannes has visited twenty countries located around the Mediterranean. He witnessed an unprecedented period of turmoil for the region: southern Europe buckling under the weight of the global economic crisis, Arab countries entangled in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and tourists and migrants encountering each other on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea
The museum of photography in Antwerp has a number of fascinating show right now. One of them is an installation by Zoe Beloff that takes as its point of departure America’s longest running comic strip to explore the influence of cinema on the movement of the body and the mind.
Beloff’s exhibition contains a number of historical documents. Some of them show intriguing photos of sportsmen and factory workers in movement. They are called chronocyclegraphs. I had never heard of the chronocyclegraph before…
I love Walter Van Beirendonck. He puts men on stilts, wraps them in latex, has them wear T-shirts with prints of preoperative drawings for plastic surgery, sends them on the runway with gas masks, corsets, prosthetic horns or with the face adorned with stick-on latex interpretations of Maori facial tattoos, etc. Actually, i think i adore that guy
To understand how mysterious jumping fish can survive in a puddle with trucks driving through it, Mateusz Herczka recreated a South American puddle in an unheated Belgian space. The huge cube of glass and metal contains a reconstruction of a puddle found in the middle of a road in Guyana, with a truck wheel rolling through it. His work is documented in an exhibition which recently opened in Antwerp
A few months before the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium, Extra City is showing one of Tillim’s recent series: Avenue Patrice Lumumba. The work examines modern history in Africa against the backdrop of its colonial and post-colonial architectural heritage
Photojournalist Geert Van Kesteren shows the disorienting reality of war-torn Iraq as he chronicles the lives of ordinary Iraqi people living in Baghdad, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey during 2006 and 2007. The book and exhibition combines Van Kesteren’s professionally photographed images with the stories of Iraqis in their own words and hundreds of cell phone pictures and digital snap shots taken by the Iraqis themselves. Some reveal places that journalists dare not tread
Photographer Danny Treacy recovers discarded clothing he finds lying around in streets, car parks and waste ground. He then stitches the garments together into spooky suits, which he wears in life-sized portraits to become Them
Sarah Pickering’s b&w photographs document the interiors of purposely-designed buildings have been repeatedly set on fire then extinguished for training exercises at the UK Fire Service College
Nick Hannes traveled across the former Soviet Union by bus and train in search of remnants of the region’s Communist past and signs of recent social transition and evolutions
One of the reasons i visited Antwerp is that i had never seen the Museum of Photography. This is going to be one of my regular stops. The exhibitions i checked out last week are now closed but the upcoming ones look great
Meet Jimmy Kets, one of the most brilliant photographers i’ve seen this year. He shot photo series around the world but the ones i found most remarkable were taken in Belgium