Playlist
The Présages series brings together aquatic landscapes chemically activated in glass tanks. They are hermetic little worlds cut off from our own, made out of minerals immersed in an aqueous solution. To made them, a whole range of components is deployed to produce a wide variety of colours and shapes.
Judy Chicago's Atmospheres series is one of the most important landmarks in ecofeminist art. At the end of the 1960s, the artist explored both natural sites and urban spaces, working with performers who bosies were covered in paint and who set off colourful flares conceived as metaphors for different emotional states. These gestures transform the landscape fleetingly, as a form of response to more authoritarian and definitive actions of male artists. Through this series of works, which questions both the place of women in art-here, the painted model is also a "painter" - and the way in which humans situate themselves in their environment. Judy Chicago links the feminist question to environmental issues, in resonance with other artists of this period, such as Ágnes Dénes or Ana Mendiete
Shot on film, 8mm/16mm.
A Way in Untilled depicts Huyghe's environment created in the compost of Kassel's park, Germany. The once disregarded area of construction debris was transformed by adding other living organisms and inanimate objects. In this situation a fluorescent-painted female dog is seen weaning a puppy, a colony of bees obscures the head of a female nude statue and pollinates medicinal plants, an uprooted tree once planted by the late German artist Joseph Beuys is eaten by ants. What occurs is unpredictable and indifferent to human presence. Over time, elements, species and environments grow, modify, interact or collapse, creating new antagonisms, associations, hospitalities, and hostilities. The camera captures this milieu and the unfolding events at a different scale, sometimes beyond human perception.
This film with no dialogue depicts a passage through the installation that, using different takes over time, creates a peculiar ecosystem in which close-ups of aquatic creatures blend with panoramic takes of rocks and wilderness, complemented by the atmospheric noise that comprises the soundtrack.
The best outside is the inside is representative of Diana Theater's work. Two video monitors display the same subject - a forest at night - in different ways: one by a fixed shot, the other by a set of reverse shots, some showing the film crew making the first shot. Here Diana Thater questions the supposed neutrality of the viewer, who becomes the object of another's attention. The presence of two screens asserts the need to approach the same object from several points of view. And what if this time, it was the forest that was watching us? In its own way, the film deconstructs our relationship with the landscape. The latter is no longer the subject of our aesthetic desire, but an environment where a series of relationships unfolds, a chain in which we are only one link.
Two video monitors, two Brightsigns media players
American video artist Diana Thater relentlessly explores the tension between the natural environment and technological culture, the wild and the domestic, science and magic. To create this work, she went inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone to document the return of wildlife in the town deserted by humans. "Chernobyl represents the failure of a massive political system, a way of life, and of science. Yet nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must," said the artist.
For this work, Thater spent time in the 'Zone of Alienation' which surrounds the site of the nuclear disaster, filming the eroded architecture and wildlife of the one-hundred mile wide radioactive territory. The animals she films have managed to survive amid the devastation of the only existing post-human landscape, demonstrating a wilderness of man's making. The installation focuses on the rare and endangered Przewalski's Horse. Once facing certain extinction in its native habitat in central Asia, this sub-species of the wild horse now roams freely in the 'Zone of Alienation'. The desolate remains of an abandoned movie theatre in Prypiat, a city founded to house the Chernobyl nuclear plant workers, will form the backdrop of Thater's installation. The city's decomposing architecture will be juxtaposed against the footage of the wild animals living in the 'Zone of Alienation'. Through this installation, visitors will experience a world where a man-made catastrophe has abruptly halted all progress and animals inhabit an irradiated landscape. Overlaying physical and filmic spaces, Thater confronts the successes of civilisation with its profound failure. For over two decades Thater has explored the precarious relationship between culture and nature. Frequently using animals and natural phenomena as subjects, her video installations are compositions of time and space. Their precisely choreographed imagery forms temporal abstractions that immerse the viewer in ambient environments and invite new ways of seeing the world.
FOR 6 PROJECTORS, 6 MEDIA PLAYERS AND LEE FILTERS
This film was inspired by a real situation. It opens with a pan of a deserted streetscape near Fukushima, Japan, which was devastated by natural and man-made disasters in 2011. Amid the ruin, the camera enters an abandoned restaurant and finds what appears to be the only survivor: a monkey adorned with a mask and costume of a young girl. This attire is similar to that in which her owners dress her to work in their sake house. Automaton-like and alone in this dystopian setting, she continues to carry out her duties—tasks she learned by watching and mimicking the restaurant's staff. Seemingly trapped in her repetitive role, she now works for herself alone.
For the first retrospective of her work in Brussels, Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt (who lives and works in Tournai and Berlin), has elaborated an approach putting new creations in dialogue with already existing works, faithful to her practice of inhabiting an exhibition location and its environment and taking as a starting point its substances, materials and specific elements.
Her works appeal to us through their strong material and corporeal character, and despite their sometimes demateria lised and abstract appearance, taking the form of video recordings, slide projections or minimal installations, they always tell us about the material composition of the world. Dekyndt designs complex forms and surfaces in permanent mutation, through associations between material, environment and support. She applies biochemical, organic or nonorganic processes on unusual supports, combining the abstract and the concrete, the particular and the universal.
Like an amateur scientist, she experiments and renders tangible and visible underlying and intrinsic processes, using techniques such as fermentation, accumulation, extraction, reduction or excess of energetic fluxes. In doing so, she also questions the difference between creation and production. By standing discreetly behind the effect produced over time by the interaction of elements on a support, she questions the artist's intervention when compared to a scientist and technological approach. In other words, she questions on one hand what can result from the domination of man over his environment, and on another of its proximity with the making of bread dough (a fermentation of cereals and water). The works' articulation creates a back and forth movement between domestic and public territories.
The first floor starts with a large surface of 'domestic' dust, works made with precious metals, dried earth and burnt objects, and even with a screening accompanied by a soundtrack with the song from a Native American rain dance.
The second floor presents several works in relation with the history of air. In Ypres, Belgium, was perpetrated the first gas bombardment in history, and in Brussels can be found a particular bacteria present in the entire Senne valley used in the making of specific beers such as the Lambic. Other works conjure the presence of copper in the building, as well as wild ferments in the air we breathe.