Discussing democracy, torture and secret services with Jill Magid

Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, has just opened an exhibition with a very promising title. Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society.

I’m going to visit it on Thursday but in the meantime i thought i’d ask one of the participating artists, Jill Magid, to tell us about the work she is showing at Z33 and more generally about her experience with impersonal power structures (police, intelligence agencies, security systems, etc.) which, whether they contribute to it or fight it, are part of this ‘architecture of fear.’

Interview with Numen / For Use

For Z33, design collective Numen / For Use left the gaffer tape in Vienna and Zagreb and used nets to turn the whole exhibition space into a giant playground that can be explored horizontally as well as vertically. The idea might look incredibly simple but the result evokes floating architecture and flexible “landscape” as much as jungle gym

Puddle Drive-Through Simulation

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

Kris Verdonck’s warehouse of machinery

The work of Kris Verdonck focuses on the confusion of man in an estranged world due to technological development. The tension between man and machine, between living species and dead materials creates an atmosphere of Unheimlichkeit or eeriness. This ‘current state of the world’ – with its environmental problems, ecological disasters and wars – is the central theme through his oeuvre

EXOTE, an indoor garden for invasive alien species

To enter garden installation EXOTE, part of Kris Verdonck – EXHIBITION #1, visitors have to wear protecting clothes. They can then walks on the bark soil between plants and parrots, just like a nature explorer. The terrestrial plants, crustraceans, insects, fish, amphibians, birds and other organisms they encounter are all “Invasive Alien Species”, they thrive outside their natural distribution area and threaten biological diversity

Aeromodeller2

This week, i’m having a chat with Lieven Standaert, the designer behind Aeromodeller2, a project which explores the possibility to build a 90-meter, zero-emission, airship that will never need to land to get its fuel, creating hydrogen from the elements it encounters and anchoring when it needs to replenish its energy in a renewable way. Aeromodeller2 might not be the most efficient nor the fastest airship but it leaves more space to imagination, dream and aspiration than anything Boeing can come up with

The seratonin knock-out rat

Ready-to-use Models, a work-in-progress project developed for Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal, attempts to question the current definitions used to indicate living creatures. Does one denominate a manipulated organism as an object, product, animal or pet? What consequences does this choice of definition entail for our perceptions, feelings and behaviours regarding living creatures?

Emerging Talents – Young Italian Art

The exhibition analyses the most recent developments in Italian contemporary art through a selection of works by the 16 artists nominated to the 2011 Emerging Talents award. Good surprises await the visitor

It’s pants in London

Apologies for updating this blog only once in a blue moon. I’ve been spending the past few days on a quest for the perfect flat. Now that mission is accomplished, i can announce that normal service will resume on Friday (tomorrow i’ll be visiting a couple of shows in Florence.) In the meantime, here’s some of the most stunning images i saw this afternoon at The Museum of London which is running a London Street Photography show until September 4, 2011

Cook Me – Black Bile

For ‘Cook Me – Black Bile’, designer Tuur Van Balen used leeches and his own blood too cook a recipe for controlling the feeling of melancholy. Synthetic biology and the new interactions it can trigger within our body are proposed as a new form of cooking, guided by one’s personal metabolism

It’s My Island

One of the artists i was most happy to discover at the exhibition Alter Nature: We Can in Hasselt a few days ago was Antti Laitinen. The finish artist fills one room of the art space with a video triptych and a series of photos from It’s My Island. The work documents Laitinen’s sisyphean attempt to build his own island (and therefore micro-nation) in the Baltic Sea. The artist accepted to answer my questions for a short interview

Alter Nature: We Can

The exhibition looks at the sub-aspect of fauna and flora in nature. Through the works of some twenty international artists we explore how humankind manipulates nature and how the concept of ‘nature’ constantly changes as a result of this

The flying tree

Raketenbaum is a performance and a diptych showing how Michael Sailstorfer had a fruit tree catapulted into the air by compressed-air cylinders attached to its root balls

Symposium The Documentary Real: videos online

The Documentary Real was probably the most satisfying conference i attended this year. I had planned to write down my notes from some of my favourite talks when Robrecht Vanderbeeken from KASK (the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent) informed me that the videos of the symposium were online

WEST ARCH – A New Generation in Architecture

The exhibition “West Arch – a new generation in architecture” shows 25 architecture studios from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany which all respond to present demands and problems in an experimental and unconventional way

‘Statics’ at the Almost Cinema festival in Ghent

By cutting thousands of little pieces of polarization filter and putting a rotating polarization filter in front of them, Wim Janssen succeeds in imitating television static by using an almost banal technique

Architecture Biennale in Venice – The Belgian pavilion

Called Usus/Usures, the exhibition investigates a specific phase in the life of construction materials: the time when they are subjected to use and are gradually re-shaped by human beings passing through them, walking on them, touching, pressing, stroking, scratching or holding them

Baghdad, 5 March 2007

The crushed vehicle does not only serve as an entry point to a discussion about the Iraq conflict, it also comments on the increasingly harsh impact of war on civilian and cultural life. A display at the museum states that at the start of the 20th century, 10 % of war casualties were civilians. Today, they make up 90%

Eros und Stasi

Some 100 works by photographers as Sibylle Bergemann, Evelyn Richter, Ulrich Wüst, Ute Mahler, Will McBride, Helga Paris and Roger Melis. In black and white, they have documented everyday situations that reflect the more recent history of East-Germany beyond high politics – snapshots that show the professional and private everyday life, political activities, urban landscapes, interiors and nudes

American Documents

Fifty years after The Americans of Robert Frank, and practically at the same time as the reconstruction of the then pioneering exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”, FotoMuseum, through the exhibition American Documents, offers a comprehensive overview of the documentary trends in American photography from the 1970 until now

What is American Power?

In this series of photos and installations in public space, Mitch Epstein explores and questions the ‘power’ that lays at the core of the United States. ‘Power’ in this case stands for both strength and energy. Over the course of 5 years he traveled through 25 states to photograph nuclear reactors, oil refineries, mines, rigs, abandoned gas pumps, wind parks, pipelines as well as their environs

Ship of Fools

Allan Sekula’s portraits of seafarers, dock workers, port cities and their industrial hinterland register the affects of globalisation on people’s lives. With these works, the artist counters the myth that underpins neoliberal ideology of painless flows of goods and capital that constitute international trade

Postopolis DF – notes from Day 4

Two of our speakers explores the cultural and economic modes of (in)formal distribution both in the world of file-sharing and in Tepito, an area of Mexico city famed for its humongous street market where you can buy pretty anything, especially if pirate, stolen or counterfeit. We also had rappers performing live, a lesson on local pride and an intense introduction on critical fetishes

Postopolis DF – Kumbia Queers

Ali Gadorki is the leader of Kumbia Queers, an all-ladies group which mixes influences from punk and Cumbia, a musical style and folk dance that is considered to be representative of Colombia. Now mixing these two is considered an heresy by most people in the punk and metal communities. It nevertheless works wonderfully

update_3 | body sound

The sound exhibition ambitions to go beyond the auditory system and uses echoes, vibrations, timbres, resonances, waves to put the body of the visitor to the test

Electrified – Hacking Public Space

The term ‘hacking’ refers to the guerrilla-like nature of some actions on the internet and at the same time to equally clandestine ‘squatting’ in the physical public space

OrganOOn at Electrified

For Electrified02, the young artist decided to ‘hack’ the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders

Design by Performance at Z33 – Performing space

Performing space extends the theme of the exhibition to architecture. Architects are indeed increasingly interested in activating the spaces they are designing. Lawrence Malstaf and Laurent Liefooghe’s works interact with the gallery space and the visitors

Design by Performance at Z33 in Hasselt – First part

The ongoing exhibition at Z33 puts the spotlight on performative trends in contemporary design. In Design by Performance the production process that leads to a product matters as much as -if not more than- the final product itself

Exhibition tip – Ed Templeton at S.M.A.K. in Ghent

The exhibition tells the story of a pro skateboarder, a photographer, a draftsman, a painter, etc. A story which, although it focuses on his own life and those of the people around him, transcends the autobiographical and exposes social and societal phenomena unhesitatingly but without pointing a finger

Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker

This is probably the best exhibition of sound art i’ve ever seen. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. The exhibition creates as such a place where the dynamic of exchange between performance and spatiality

Hacking pigeons + Synthetic Immune System

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

Images of the Belgian Congo

On June 30, the Democratic Republic of Congo will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Belgium. Photographer Carl de Keyzer traveled through the country following the “Guide Du Voyageur du Congo Belge”. Published in 1954, the touristic guide presented Congo as the ideal holiday destination with stunning scenery, brand new roads, musement parks for white people only, missions, factories, etc. These places have now lost much of their former glory, they are either ruins or used for identical or different purposes

Rentyhorn, making the legacy of colonialism visible

Artist Sascha Huber symbolically renames “Rentyhorn” a mountain currently named Agassizhorn, after Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz. Renty was a slave from the Congo whose picture Agassiz had taken in the United States in the 1850s as a proof of the inferiority of the black race. The performance is part of a campaign that attempts to make the legacy of colonialism visible

BIP 2010 – Out of Control, Berlin

Overseen by two Berlin curators Dr. Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Stifftung) and Félix Hoffmann (C/O Berlin), this exhibition is small, impeccably curated and it is also the one that follows most punctiliously the main theme of the exhibition: control and its antithesis

BIP 2010 – Equilibrium and Accident

The Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts has invited about a hundred artists to question society’s growing desire for control, surveillance, and regulation. A worrying tendency which leaves space for accident, irrationality, for the unexpected and the absurd

Book review – Digital Folklore

Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media

BIP2010 – The Acrobatic Squad

The 7th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts in Liege is one of the most exciting art events i’ve seen in a while. This year’s theme is (Out of) Control. It oscillates between the cheerful and the somber, between the mundane and the extraordinary. I’ll get back to you with a proper report but i couldn’t help singling out a quirky series of photos i discovered at the biennial

Artissima – The photographs

A short selection of the photo works i saw at Turin’s contemporary art fair earlier this month

Persona. Ritual masks and contemporary art

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