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Showing posts with the label Artexte

Reviews: Céline Huyghebaert at Artexte and Natascha Niederstrass at Patrick Mikhail

For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay. Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphori...

Review: Sophie Jodoin's d’un seul souffle at Artexte

Sophie Jodoin ’s d’un seul souffle exhibit is the product of a research residency at Artexte during which she examined the various documents collected under the names of female artists in the 410 sector of the institute. From them she photographed, scanned, and photocopied images and texts, integrating these into two works. One, a video, d’un seul souffle , and the other, a book. They occupy (more or less) separate spaces. The video has its own white room with a bench. The book sits on a shelf suspended from a brutalist surface. It can be flipped through. Facing it is a wall of names, arranged alphabetically like the dead at a cenotaph, of the artists that she examined. A book of her own, fastened so it cannot be leafed through, provides an additional joining point, sitting at the entrance to the video like a prop for a staged memorial.

Review: Goose Village at Occurence | Where Were You in '92? at Optica | Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place at Artexte

Before making a series of generalizing statements about these three exhibitions, it is incumbent on me to provide you with their statements of rationalization, each of which avoids any justification for their mode of display, at best vaguely waving it off as “ experimentation”: