For Centrale | vitrine, Gladys Sauvage is questioning our relation with gesture and with the power to create by proposing a performative and evolving installation. A few streets away from the Grand-Place, the birthplace of lace-making, she creates a bobbin lace within the vitrine, just like Brussels’ lacemakers.

At the end of the 19th century, lacemakers still played with their bobbins in Brussels’ shop windows. The industrial era, followed by automatisation has made this craft almost obsolete. No longer profitable, lacemakers disappeared.

Gladys Sauvage builds her lace loom specifically for Centrale | vitrine. Designing and building her work tool is a way for the artist to reappropriate this craft. As an extension of her hands, she becomes one with her lace loom. Through this yesteryear technique and slow gesture, Gladys Sauvage questions the concept of mass production and profitability.

The lace or mycelium spreads throughout the vitrine. The artist is working there in real time at different dates: September 19 and 20, October 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 and November 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17.

Gladys Sauvage (1995, FR), lives and works in France.

Gladys Sauvage graduated with a Master’s degree in Tapestry and Textile Arts from the Académie royale des Beaux-arts de Bruxelles in 2020. She also acquired the Fashion Designer certificate at the Atelier Chardon Savard in Nantes. Bobbin lace is the medium at the heart of her artistic practice.

Centrale presents Maren Dubnick’s exhibition ACCUMULATOR at Centrale | vitrine (04.04 > 01.09.2024).

At a time when Centrale is undergoing a major transformation of its exhibition and public spaces, and reaffirming its new identity, Maren Dubnick (visual artist) and Clémentine Davin (curator) are reactivating the original function of the site, with the aim of offering a social and historical insight into the art centre which was once the first power station of the City of Brussels. Through an installation in Centrale | vitrine, the duo takes a look at the evolving use of electricity and its impact on contemporary society, creating a metaphorical link between the past and future lives of Centrale.

The artist-curator duo

Maren Dubnick, visual artist & Clémentine Davin, art historian and art critic, met in Brussels in 2018. Since then, they have been working together on a regular basis to develop their respective projects, and more specifically on issues relating to mediation and the place of art in society. They share many common concerns, but above all they share a keen interest in collaborative artistic approaches that aim to democratise art. In 2021, they are working together on a residency-laboratory project entitled “Axis-Mundi de l’ancrage au Monde”, supported by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles as part of its call for projects Un Futur pour la Culture 2021-22.

Maren DUBNICK (°1972, BE/DE) uses stacking and coiling strategies to question our relationship with time. Like a representation of infinity, her practice is based on a repetitive, even meditative process that requires both mastery and patience.

Clémentine DAVIN (°1985, FR) has worked alongside artists for many years, taking an active part in their exhibitions and projects. She is also a regular contributor to the art magazines l’art même and Flux News and, since 2022, has been a member of the board of the Fédération des Arts Plastiques (FAP).

With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation

CENTRALE presents Antoinette d’Ansembourg‘s exhibition “From the ground, with love” at CENTRALE | vitrine (23.11.2023 > 17.03.2024).

Antoinette d’Ansembourg’s draws the timeless strangeness that emanates from her installations from the territory of the city, where new building sites blossom daily, ripping open buildings and excavating streets to expose the overhead or underground networks of cables that supply it with their fluids or electrical flows like a living being. In these areas off-limits to the public and of uncertain temporality, she notes the connections between rubble and plants that have the capacity to grow in hostile environments. She is sensitive to these changes in the nature of beings and things, to their transgenic potential. A “confrontation between human construction and the development of nature” is questioned by the artist in the very construction of her installations, where unspeakable mutations are forged and unnatural organisms are born, resulting from the improbable combination of the living and the waste.

With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation

Photo © Harold Lechien

Antoine Waterkeyn‘s artistic practice manifests itself in the perpetual writing and rewriting of plots and narrative constructions. He plays with archetypes and characters from famous novels or from our collective memory. In his works, the narrative is deliberately left open to interpretation.

For his exhibition at CENTRALE | vitrine, Antoine Waterkeyn presents an installation of larger-than-life painted figures. The artist is inspired by the character of the monstrous figure in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and the Court of Miracles (La Cour des miracles) in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Based on these stories, Waterkeyn imagines a Eurovision competition for intellectuals, bringing together the winners of an atypical, little-awarded category: a collection of anti-heroes and villains from popular culture.

The artist takes us back to the marginalized figures of the Court of Miracles in the Middle Ages: beggars, hoodlums, vagabonds posing as cripples in the streets of Paris to deceive passers-by. As if by a miracle, at nightfall, they suddenly start walking normally, or regain their sight or the use of their limbs.

By gathering these iconic characters, Antoine Waterkeyn pays tribute to the anti-heroes of his collection. In this way, the artist holds up an inverted mirror of today’s dominant society to the passers-by of the Sainte-Catherine Street.

― Where am I? cried the affrighted poet.

― In the Cour des Miracles, replied a fourth spectre. who had joined them.

― Miracles, upon my soul, rejoined Gringoin, for here are blind who see and lame who run.

A sinister laugh was their only answer.

The poor poet cast his eyes around him. He was actually in that dreaded Cour des Miracles, into which no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour; a magic circle, in which the officers of the Chatelet and the sergeants of the provost who ventured within it were disposed of in a trice; the haunt of thieves; a hideous wen on the face of Paris; a sewer disgorging every morning and receiving every night that fetid torrent of vice, mendicity, and roguery which always overflows the streets of great capitals;

a monstrous hive to which all the drones of the social order retired at night with their booty; the hospital of imposture where the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the blackguards of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, idolaters, covered with painted wounds, beggars by day, transmogrified themselves into banditti at night; immense robing-room, in short, whither all the actors of that eternal comedy which theft, prostitution, and murder are performing in the streets of Paris, resorted at that period to dress and undress.

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), extract

Robberto & Milena Atzori present LA FOULE at CENTRALE | vitrine (16.03 > 11.06.2023). Multidisciplinary artists Robberto & Milena have been working as a duo since 2017. Their work blends painting and sculpture with textile art and embroidery. They question the relationship between society and individual obsessions.

The artist duo collaborates in a creative process where both are contaminated by one another. They explore the shifting forces between religion and magic, esotericism and instinct, and wakefulness and sleep.

For their exhibition at CENTRALE | vitrine, Robberto & Milena Atzori propose LA FOULE, populated by polymorphous creatures made entirely of stuffed fabrics covered by watercolours and embroidery. Their almost human-sized dimensions echo the bodies of their audience. The assembly of coloured sculptures underlines not only the plurality of bodies, but also the weakness of the notion of identity. By questioning what we define as “normal”, Robberto & Milena Atzori wish to submit this crowd to the gaze of passers-by on St Catherine Street, revealing the illusion of the immutable character of individual identity.

The vitrine displays a multitude of creatures crammed in the space facing the passers-by on St Catherine Street. Despite the use of colours that evoke harmony, the installation addresses the fear of being confined, crammed into an uncomfortable promiscuity. Between a feeling of unease and a need for contact, LA FOULE looks at the ambivalence of our relationship with otherness.

With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation