Young Americans in Thessaloniki

Painting Adrienne Elyse Meyers

This exhibition presents the paintings of three American artists who focus on space in their work, Michelle Jezierski, Joseph Kameen and Adrienne Elyse Meyers. The interiors, landscapes, and other constellations they create are not just physical spaces, but also spaces of the mind that evoke memories and suspense, triggering perception and the imagination.

Geometric and organic shapes come together in the work of Michelle Jezierski. To find a compositional structure, she shifts and breaks observed spaces into vertical, horizontal, or diagonal bands, rearranging them to introduce an abstract rhythm into the image. Coming from a family of musicians, Jezierski likes to approach painting through aspects such as rhythm, harmony, or dissonance.

In the domestic interiors of Joseph Kameen, the everyday order of things seems disrupted. Objects have special powers, making us witness moments of alienation or wonder. A play of light and shadow leads the attention through the rooms. “The subjects of my paintings, both figures and objects, are in the process of coming to terms with their surroundings,” the artist explains.

In the works of Adrienne Elyse Meyers, empty interiors or fragments of rooms give opportunities for speculation about things that might have happened next door, or that are about to occur. The action itself is not depicted; it is just the stage that we see in the paintings. “I play into the image’s uncertainties,” the artist remarks. “What is in the next room, outside the window, or filling a silhouette is undisclosed (…)

Young Americans opens at Donopoulos IFA in Thessaloniki on December 17th, 2021 and will be on view till 27 February 2022. The exhibition is curated by Jurriaan Benschop. Image: Adrienne Elyse Meyers, Adjoining, 2020, oil on canvas 25 x 20 cm.

A Grammar of Gestures in Athens

Exhibition view A Grammar of Gestures

‘A Grammar of Gestures’ is an international painting exhibition. Human figures, animals, or elements of landscape appear in the works on display, but these motifs present themselves neither in a singular, unambiguous way, nor as a hard subject matter. Rather, the center of attention is on the dynamics of shapes, on the ability of forms to flip and change appearance while you are looking at them. This shifting has to do with the way the motifs are executed, with the grammar of painterly gestures that is involved in the conception of the works.

For David Benforado (image left) the canvas is both a possibility to evoke a landscape as a surface that reflects an inner state of being, and a panel of thoughts. What appears to be a night landscape might change into an internal view when reading the title of the work ‘Ultrasound.’

Béatrice Dreux (image right) uses simple motifs like a moon, a cloud, or a rainbow, and from there, she develops the forms in a process of layering and detailed surface treatment until they gain an inner strength. For Dreux painting is a language in itself. When she paints, she is not aiming to tell a story, or make some statement about subject matter. Instead it is about texture, gesture, color, and form, and how these elements together on the canvas speak to us directly.

“A Grammar of Gestures” is on view till 18 March 2022 at Kourd Gallery in Athens. With Maria Capelo, Mark Lammert, Michael Markwick, Beatrice Dreux and David Benforado.

Caroline Walker in The Hague

The more than twenty paintings in “Windows,” London-based painter Caroline Walker’s first solo show at a museum, depict women engaged in various kinds of work: a maid in a hotel room, a hostess taking reservations in a restaurant, a hairdresser on the salon floor. Walker observes these figures through a window or doorway. Such framed views add a layer of estrangement and abstraction to her quotidian scenes, ensuring that we viewers never forget our voyeuristic perspective.

Walker is keyed to the social environments her figures inhabit, homing in on details such as lighting, decor, and body language. At the same time, she moves through different ways of mark-making, shifting gears between the clearly articulated and foggier parts of an interior, for example, or between sparkling accents such as a glistening glass with an orange drink on the table and bland patches like a blank wall.

These paintings do not contrive spectacular effects, but rather impress through their insistent focus on scenes of contemporary life that might otherwise go unnoticed. A swirling pattern of flowers on the window of a hair salon, for example, attracts our attention to what is happening inside. Through painting, the artist bestows attention on women, their occupations, and their more or less fortunate situation in society. This alone does not grant them agency; Walker’s work, often based on photographs taken in secret, is less concerned with producing empowering representations than it is with probing the act of spectatorship. She enacts the possibility of painting to accumulate layers of reflection, a haptic experience of life observed, leaving the sociological analysis to her viewers.

This text was first published as a Critics’ Pick on Artforum.com in November 2021

Elisabeth Frieberg in Stockholm

studio elisabeth frieberg stockholm

During my visit to Sweden, the artist showed me the works of her grandparents, Beth Zeeh and Ryno Frieberg, both painters whose works can be seen in their former house in the countryside. Driving there, a good hour outside of Stockholm, I watched the landscape change into gently curving meadows, farms, forests, and lakes. I became aware of the natural background of Frieberg’s works, the visual “material” the artist has seen so often, even if only subconsciously, as it was simply always there. You might wonder why she did not become a landscape painter, considering that she grew up as a country girl, playing at the lakeside, catching fish under the bridge, and seeing how animals were fed at the farm nearby. Or you could argue that she did become a landscape painter, but she did so in the age of abstraction, where the focus is not necessarily on what can be recognized as a depiction in a painting, but on what is present in terms of energy and ideas, colors and forms. Broadly speaking, and probably more correctly, we could call Frieberg a nature-based painter. Her paintings cannot really be separated from nature, just as they cannot be separated from the late 20th century in which she grew up. She went to art school in Umeå at a time when abstract and conceptual takes on art had become part of daily practice and conversation. Abstraction was neither a novelty nor the result of a reductive view on reality, but simply an existing vocabulary with its own expressive possibilities. At the same time, for Frieberg, every part of her “abstract” paintings is rooted in nature – in the color of the sky, the movement of water, the pattern of a bird’s feather.

(…)

From the essay: “Connecting to the Source,” published in the book Elisabeth Frieberg, Rhythm Nature Movement God, Kewenig Gallery, 2021.

Eeva-Leena Eklund

I wonder if Eeva-Leena Eklund orders her pizzas because of the taste, or because of the visual patterns they provide. Throughout the years she has painted quite some different types. In square and circular paintings, salami and paprika have transformed into abstract patterns, color dots and stripes. Basically this approach applies to other motifs as well. It starts with things from everyday life, like flowers, cats or fruit. Then the artist zooms in, looks for rhythm and color dynamics, and discovers a not yet familiar sight within the figuration.

At the EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) in Finland, Eeva-Leena Eklund made an installation in which she combines paintings with photographs. She mixies many works together, presenting them side by side, creating a visual explosion. One should not be fooled by the abundance of flowers and density of colors. Within the cheerful abundance, many contrasts can be found. The sweet comes with the sour, the soft with the sharp and the work is as comforting as it is provocative. The exhibition as a whole transmits a spirit of freedom, in how to look at life, how to be yourself, and how to make painting the art of the day that matters most.

The exhibition Eeva-Leena Eklund is up till 22 August 2021 at the EMMA (close to Helsinki), curated by Anna Tuori, and commissioned by the Saastamoinen Foundation.

We Need to Talk

Helmut Federle exhibiton Basel

In Covid times, some galleries are encouraging their audience to window shop. They put on the lights at night so that you can enjoy the exhibition. Does that work? I tried it one evening in Berlin – I went to see a painting behind the glass as I stood on the street. But what happened was that instead of being satisfied, my longing to move in closer and enjoy the real thing grew; I became aware of what I could not have. What can we do when art is not accessible and we are blocked from the regular format of gallery visits? Can we enjoy art in a different way?

Most lockdown policies imply that art is not essential or ‘system relevant.’ In the eyes of politicians, art is like the cherry on the cake. Nice and tasty, but you can do without it. Most people might even agree that it is more important to get vegetables, have soap, bread and milk, or even a bottle of wine, than to see art. But what if the situation lasts, which is the case in many countries? What happens when museums, galleries, and theatres stay closed for months? Life starts to become shallow, repetitive; people find themselves unmotivated or indifferent. It is taking too long. Art is not just a cherry, it is part of the fabric (or dough, if you wish) of culture: of reflecting the stressful times we live in, of phrasing ideals we share. Art, for instance, allows looking into people’s problems with a refreshing distance; it can offer a reflective space or a shift in perspective and the possibility to engage with the irrational and unconscious. It invites and reminds us to be more than just a functional, economic being that eats, sleeps and works.

Read the full text on Arterritory

Gerlind Zeilner

painting by Gerlind Zeilner artist from Vienna

Till February 26, 2021, Gerlind Zeilner shows in Los Angeles. Her first exhibition at Nino Mier gallery is called ‘Open End’. For more insight into the practice of the Vienna based artist, there is the book Gerlind Zeilner, Cowgirls, published in 2020 on the occasion of her exhibition at the Halle für Kunst und Medien in Graz, Austria. A fragment from the book you find here:

“What do lines express, apart from being an instrument to depict an object or landscape, or connect things?  Do they have an expression of themselves? There can be something nervous about the lines in Zeilner’s painting, just the way they are drawn expresses sensitivity for nuance and contradictions. There is often change of color in one ongoing line, there is hesitation in the execution, the artist did not want to look things all straight and doubtless. While the world can presents itself as busy and overwhelming, the task of the artist here, seems to be to cope with that, to brings things down to a manageable and insightful level. Painting could be: to show some kind of order within the multitude of forms and phenomena. To slow down the endless threads of stories that surround us, and can easily carry us away.  

Zeilner’s way of ‘drawing painting’ evokes proximity, it gives a sense of immediate touch. As if we can feel, through the lines, that the artist touched the material, while defining forms. I see a special power of Zeilner’s work in this haptic quality, combined with her typical gesture that provides us with a kind of thinking out loud of the hand. The resulting aesthetics is active and vivid; it makes what we usually regard as solid forms (the structure of a café interior, with all its furniture for instance) as an open, moving, transparent and energetic situation. This vividness is underlined through the fact that the works remain unresolved. There are always areas where something still needs to be to filled in, to be completed by the beholder.”

From the essay ‘Walking the Line’ by Jurriaan Benschop published in Gerlind Zeilner, 2020, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna. You can visit the website of the artist here. To see views from the exhibition at Nino Mier gallery in Los Angels, click here.

Listen to Your Eyes at Voorlinden

Exhibition Listen to Your Eyes at Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands, Juan Munoz, Bridget Riley, review by Jurriaan Benschop

Even though he is its founder, Joop van Caldenborgh is usually not the one curating the presentations at Museum Voorlinden in The Netherlands. Yet on the occasion of this 80th birthday last autumn, he made an exception and designed his favorite trail through the collection, resulting in the exhibition Listen to Your Eyes. Which works did he choose from all of those that he had chosen once before, one after the other, over many decades?

Standing in front of a large Alex Katz painting, Van Caldenborgh says that artists such as Katz taught him to think “outside the box”. “There is something about artists that is weird or unadapted. Otherwise it doesn’t work. As a businessman, when I started collecting, I was not used to that.” Katz’s Twelve Hours (1984) consists of four connected panels that each show three people in social interaction. The flatness of Katz’s paintings is at work both on a formal and a psychological level – his figures are in lively conversation, yet they remain detached in terms of who they are or what they think. The museum has more paintings by Katz, and plans to present a solo exhibition of his work next year. After presentations of works by Ellsworth Kelly (in 2016) and Jonas Wood (in 2018) and Wayne Thiebaud (in 2018), Katz will be the fourth American painter whose work will be highlighted at Voorlinden.

Preferences change over the years, and Van Caldenborgh, who has collected for more than 60 years, cannot be expected to stay committed to all of the artists whose works he has acquired. Yet he likes to follow certain artists as he believes in their enterprise. This has been the case with Dutch painter Philip Akkerman, who has been painting his own self-portrait since the 1980s – it is his only and daily motif. Van Caldenborgh visits the artist once a year to pick some works. The collector likes art with a twist, be it through a rigid concept like Akkerman’s, or presented as a visual punch, like in Erwin Wurm’s Pudelhaube (2019) – an oversized beanie under which visitors can stand and appear to have “lost their head”, or which can also be contemplated as a soft sculpture in itself.

A pre-Columbian piece of fabric, possibly 1400 years old (maker unknown) and depicting a checkerboard pattern of colors, hangs in a room with works by Ryan Gander, Thomas Demand and Alberto Burri. It looks like an intimate abstract painting. It is possible to relate the delicate textile piece to the work of Burri, in which surface and materiality are most important, even though the context in which these objects were made are worlds apart. By introducing an ancient artifact in the context of contemporary art, Van Caldenborgh shows that he has himself learned to think “outside the box”. He listens to his eyes indeed.

Tjebbe Beekman’s painting Abstellraum (2006) was made during the period in which the artist lived in Berlin – he was fascinated by how history was so very present in the buildings and city spaces he visited. Van Caldenborgh suggests that this painting of a storage room could be regarded as an inversion of Luc Tuymans’ approach. While Tuymans paints scenes that seem innocent, but hide a dark or unsettling (war) history, in Beekman’s painting it seems that we are looking at a dark and charged atmosphere even though it is, in fact, just an ‘innocent’ space adjacent to a Berlin beer garden that the artist noticed one day. It offers a moment to reflect on the importance of things that are not always visible in a painting.

Listen to Your Eyes shows a bit of everything. Most artists represented in the collection have at least one piece in the show, which allows for displaying the diversity of the collection. Van Caldenborgh seems to follow the thread of previous collection presentations curated by museum staff. Such an approach is good for raising the visitor’s curiosity and can lead to discovering artists that are new to them, but it is less accommodating in terms of getting a deeper sense of an artist’s mentality, obtaining an understanding of the context in which a work was developed, or developing a dialogue between artists. It is hard to develop lasting storylines with so many different types of works.

At first sight you would not think that Liza Lou’s wall piece Pannus (2018) is made of little beads, as it looks more like a collection of hanging fabrics. The artist works with collectives of women in South Africa to conceive highly labor-intensive handmade pieces and installations. The shared manual work is about more than just producing an object or an installation: for the artist, it is about labor conditions and about the question of how immaterial qualities like empathy can become part of both the artistic process and what we are looking at. The work of Lou is presented in the seventh and last room of the exhibition, which is my favorite room as I feel that here the works relate to each other in a way that adds to their individual meaning.

Nils Völker has made a kinetic sculpture – miniature pinwheels (the colorful ones children play with) mounted on the wall in the form of a circle. Powered by electricity, the pinwheels begin to spin every now and then and in different rhythms, thereby causing a visual play. To place this lighthearted work next to a painting by a grand old lady of abstraction, Bridget Riley, might be considered daring – but it works. Both artists – again, worlds apart – embrace the pleasure of looking at things, and present their fascination for optics. A dynamic quality is something Riley always looked for in the stationary medium of painting: to make the canvas vibrate and active through various color combinations. Looking at something is a work that is never finished.

A sculpture by the late Juan Muñoz completes the scene, and brings in a figurative element in a room with mostly abstract works. Two bronze figures lean towards one another in conversation. The figures are smaller than life-size, and instead of having legs, each one ‘sits’ atop a bulbous base. They are half human, half something else. Muñoz’s figures have the ability to change the atmosphere in the room, mixing beauty with a sense of secrecy and melancholy. They transform the room into a stage where the visitor is complicit, but without saying in exactly what.

“Listen to Your Eyes” will be on view through 5 September 2021 at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands. This text was first published on Arterritory on January 19th, 2021

Glenn Brown in Berlin

Glenn Brown exhibitioin at Max Hetzler gallery Berlin

Since his appearance on the 1990’s London art scene, Glenn Brown has been in an ongoing dialogue with his predecessors, without being afraid of mutilating his examples or pushing aspects of their work to the limits through stylish deviation and exaggeration. For his exhibition And thus we existed, the artist presents 17 recent paintings that are loosely based on historical figure drawings, alongside six paint-based sculptures. 

Multiple sources often come together in one painting, such as in the green Bring on the Headless Horses (2020), which projects a seated nude over a Hercules figure, intertwining them. This piece is based on works by two 17th– and 18th-century artists (Mr. Brown usually prefers not to disclose the names of his sources, unless of course they are mentioned in the title), but it also references the artist’s own previous work.

Seeing a painting by Glenn Brown is like watching a peacock opening its tail. It is full of proud beauty, carefully orchestrated colors, and within the repeating patterns there are many little “eyes” hidden in the paint, in curving lines. Sometimes they are intentionally meant as eyes, but they are often just blinking moments that draw the attention into the dense figuration, creating anchor points in what seems an overwhelming and cluttered play of lines and colors around a human figure. For the current exhibition Brown was apparently triggered by the multitude of curving, shorter and longer lines that can be found in drawings. He uses them to shape his figures, serving representation, but he also lets them shine as free-moving ornaments in a rich display of color and paint.

Seeing these works, I wondered if the artist considered a path through each of them, in terms of where to start looking, where to continue, and where to leave the painting. Some shops make customers go through their offer in just such a prescribed way. There is no way to find what you are looking for without passing a variety of other offers that call for your attention. In Brown’s case, there are many distractions to look at, and the viewer might wonder if there is a point at which everything comes together. Looking for meaning here feels like a game of a hide-and-seek, in which everything is curling and swirling, in which figures are appearing and disappearing, and the image never comes to rest. 

It is interesting how different the temperaments of the individual works are – ranging from light and airy, to melancholic or tormented – while sharing the same compositional principles. Color seems to be the decisive factor here, giving each work its own pitch. Some small paintings though, like Drawing 9 (After Baselitz) (2017), stand out without (or with just a little) color, and for their dynamics, rely on the contrast between black and white, and between dense and emptier areas. The play of lines in this work is reminiscent of a detailed mountain map where differences in elevation are indicated, even though the actual image is that of a face.

There is not one way to go through the paintings – there are endless ways, and I figure that the artist conceived his work rather purposely in such a way that it is not easy to find an exit. Yet, he gives us some spots that serve well as entrances, like a single red shape against a green, forming a hand, or the blinking eyes that pull attention like a vortex. Once inside the painting, the eye keeps wandering, moving over to an opposite color, or looking for a repetition of the same blue. Everything is connected, yet everything is also loose and by itself. Mr. Brown succeeds in evoking a restless dynamic in a medium that is often thought of as stationary. The many hours of meticulous labor invested in getting at this result has its counterpart in the time needed to “read” and experience the painting fully. There is not one single image – there are many brought together into one painting under the pretext of depicting a figure.

–Jurriaan Benschop

On view at Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin, untill 23 January 2021 (due to covid by appointment only)

Other Reviews

Riga Biennial 2020

Riga Biennial 2020, work by Valdis Celms

Due to the pandemic, the second edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) opened months later than planned, and only for a short time. Covid-19 became co-author of the biennial, it says in the introductory text written by curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, because works had to be adapted, but also because the perspective on art has changed. Since the pandemic, the world is no longer the same.

The curator designed a storyline about the end of the world – or rather, about the end of worlds, or eras. In doing so, she tapped into the history of the host country, Latvia, which has experienced many end times due to occupation and crisis. But also in a broader sense, she was looking for artists who convey a sense of the end times, or who feel the pulse of our remarkable, if not gloomy time. The title, and suddenly it all blossoms, therefore came somewhat out of the blue. RIBOCA 2 is a restrained, carefully composed exhibition that has its moments, but cheerful is not the right word to characterize the show. It is rather grim and dark. Seldom it reminds of spring or blossoms. Instead it has a focus on depicting change and exposing connections.

The biennial takes place in Andrejsala, a former harbor area of Riga. Entering the first hangar building you see in big colorful letters the words “LIFE TIME.” It is probably the most frivolous moment of the show. It is one of Ugo Rondinone’s Rainbow Poems that, as Lamarche-Vadel points out, “urges you to enjoy the moment, but at the same time asks what you do with the time you have been given.” In the next room, the American artist Bridget Polk is busy stacking sculptures made from pieces of stone. They are vertical, balancing works, which sometimes only remain upright for a short time. They are not meant to last. Polk is a former drug and alcohol addict who, as she remarked, found a healthy new addiction in “rock balancing” and who, by being invited to participate in RIBOCA, suddenly entered the international art scene. Her work is about being in the moment, and mixing with the material.

With this prelude, the curator sets the tone when it comes to the question of what art is. She likes to incorporate work that has not yet existed in an art context. And she seems not keen on showing work that might look like classical sculpture. It is the spirit of Duchamp, rather than Brancusi, that has guided her. Aesthetically (or also: anti-aesthetically), Polk’s work fits into the post-industrial landscape of debris, abandoned buildings, and concrete overgrown with plants. The curator sees Polk’s Sisyphian attitude as the epitome of what being an artist means: the stone is lifted up again and again, and then falls back, starting over.

More than 2000 tree trunks float in one of the harbor basins. The work Currents, by Lina Lapelyté and Mantas Petraitis, is a reminder that we are in Latvia, a country that consists more than half of forest, and where logging has been important since the Middle Ages. In the old days, logs were transported on the flow of the river. This came to an end in 1974, when a dam was built near Riga for a new hydropower plant. It is not the only work in this biennial that refers to the history of Latvia and the strong connection that the Latvians have with nature, which is also reflected in songs and poetry. Every Latvian has a home somewhere in the countryside to retire to, and in the corona lockdowns, this was appreciated even more. “Latvians know the forest like no other,” says Lamarche-Vadel. “They know every plant and its workings.” The taste and medicinal effects of plants are also discussed in the biennial.

The main location is a former harbor building, a concrete colossus where hardly any daylight penetrates. Pigeons crawl in through broken windows, and the interventions required for RIBOCA have deliberately been kept visible: the rubble from the knocked-out walls is still on the floor next to the doorways. Lamarche-Vadel does not want the exhibition to be a closed castle, but seeks a porous model that is open to society. The inhabitants of Riga appreciate that this building and this part of the city can now be re-entered; it attracts the curious, but there are also critical voices who find the post-industrial Tarkovsky atmosphere of the site depressing, and serving the cliché of the post-Soviet landscape too much.

Andrejsala is also the location where a new contemporary art museum had been planned. Rem Koolhaas’s design from 2006 had been approved by the Riga city council, but then the financial crisis kicked in, and the museum remained a dream. In Koolhaas’s design, the white-cube needs of the museum were balanced with the presence of history on this location. RIBOCA, instead, mainly focuses on the latter. The harbor building is a black box where works of art become visible in theatrical lighting. The setting recalls the ninth edition of Manifesta, which played on the post-industrial landscape in the Belgian city of Genk in 2012, and at the same time thematized it as an end time.

In terms of theory, Lamarche-Vadel was inspired by Les trois écologies of the French thinker Félix Guattari, a 1989 text that paints a dark picture of the current state of capitalism that rules us, and in which old binary contradictions, such as those between the first and third world, have given way to multipolar, difficult-to-fathom networks. “Nothing can happen before the mental ecology happens,” says Lamarche-Vadel. “First we have to understand our situation, where we place ourselves as humans.” She thereby also sketches the framework of her exhibition, and the potential that she sees in art. Change, she pictures, can only come from art.

The fact that Covid-19 presented itself as co-author of the exhibition takes revenge at times. To view the artifacts that Tomás Saraceno would have used for fossil-free travel from Berlin to Riga is informative, but does not make an exciting work of art. The dialogue that Pawel Althamer had foreseen with the audience does not show in the corona version consisting of some photocopies on the floor. Disappointingly, a number of sculptural installations (unaffected by Covid-19) are also not able to steal the show, with a few exceptions, such as the gigantic kinetic sculpture Positron by Valdis Celms. Originally designed in 1976, it was intended for a factory in Ukraine, to strengthen workers’ morale. However, it only ended up being produced now, for this biennial. 

The fact that the exhibition in the main building nevertheless gains in concentration and depth is mainly due to the films. First, there is a dark and slow film by Pierre Huyghe, which microscopically zooms in on a piece of amber (abundant in Latvia) and which contains information about ancient plants and animals. Moments later, a video by Brussels-based Eva L’Hoest, The Inmost Cell, takes the viewer on a journey beneath the surface of the Western Daugava River, past underwater ruins. Here, an archeology of “an end time” is conducted with a virtual camera, in which transformations such as between waving water and grass run smoothly. Everything flows and is part of an enchanting continuum. The film Présage – SiO2, by Hicham Berrada, brings us underwater again, and we see how natural and chemical materials collect on the bottom of a glass tank, and how they react with each other. While looking at it, you get the feeling that the beauty is caused by the pollution.

In the film contributions to this biennial, you can feel how artists become fascinated and enchanted by material, and how the material world is full of life and connections – full of beauty, but also connected with politics and corruption. People play a role in this, but they certainly do not play the leading role. An interesting aspect of the exhibition is how humans are put into perspective, and how other forms of life are put in the spotlight instead. A highlight is Eglé Budvytyté’s Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars, in which a group of teenagers move like insects (or are they cyborgs?) through a landscape of forest and beach. In the choreography of moving bodies, the youngsters are one moment draped limply like dishcloths, while the next moment moving on all fours through the sand, with optimal body tension, like a scorpion on the beach. In previous performances, the artist had already shown her eye for the finer points of body language, and how it can tell something about politics, beliefs, and identity. And how strength and fragility are linked. In this case, man appears as one of several variants of life; you could also see the suggestion of a post-human time.

A succession of cinematic works with overlapping themes creates, throughout the biennial, the feeling of looking at a film of life, with a corresponding soundtrack. Even though they are made by different artists, the films share muted colors and subdued sounds, but each in its own way is refined, attentive, and precise. In the choice of cinematic works, an aesthetic vision unfolds, and an ode to the object and to the material world. Curiously enough, this does not not primarily happen through sculpture, but rather through this detour of film and video. Not to mention that painting, also a material medium, is fully absent in this biennial.

The film Atomic by the artist collective Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen tells the story of a jewel made of tritium, a material that was created as a by-product of nuclear tests. A nicely dressed, somewhat bored woman walks around with the jewel, taking in the admiration of men, and amused by the fact that people do not know what deadly beauty they are attracted to. 

When it became clear that the coronavirus would prevent the planned summer-long biennial, the curator decided to make a film of the whole project. This choice surprised me at first, as it seems difficult, if not impossible, to convey in film the experience of visiting such a large-scale exhibition. Yet, considering that within the biennial, the cinematic works make the biggest impression, it could work out as a nice surprise. Lamarche-Vadel herself calls the (still to be presented) RIBOCA film an additional work – it should not be seen as a documentary that can replace the exhibition. However, it may help the survival of  an event that many eyes have missed due to Covid19.

An earlier version of this text was published in Dutch in HART magazine (Belgium) Nr. 207, 7 October 2020.