Expecting my mind to be in a better shape (23.06 > 23.10.2022) presents the work of artist Axel Korban in an installation created for CENTRALE | vitrine. An invitation to bridge two worlds in a synthetic, multidimensional reality.
The exhibition brings together in a single display a body of works in resin and metal.
Axel Korban works on a hybrid aesthetic of ‘digital trauma’, attempting to describe what he calls “conflict images” and to divert the objects that populate them.
The artist extracts plastic organic forms, an alloy of different materials such as steel, industrial foam and textiles. These materials and forms of opposite natures nevertheless share the technological interface of which they are the product: the 3D space of simulation.
Expecting my mind to be in a better shape addresses the foundations of Axel Korban’s work, which in recent years has been devoted to the creation of computer-modelled 3D exhibitions, mixing real places filled with virtual objects, and virtual places populated with real objects.
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
A poem that fades away under a downpour (Marcel Broodthaers), a painting that takes shape under a sheet (Angel Vergara), an empty plinth, reminiscent or becoming of an artwork (Fabrice Samyn), automatic drawings like so many traces of trauma and creed against the forgotten colonial history (Pélagie Gbaguidi), the drawn shadow of an invisible tree (Sophie Whettnall), elements of a forgotten Merzbau (Guy-Marc Hinant), receptacle artworks of the beyond (dospace), CCTV images that question the boundary between visibility and invisibility (Emmanuel Van der Auwera) …
The exhibition Traces de l’invisible (Traces of the Invisible) plunges the viewer into the depths of the human soul, activating areas of inactive sensibilities. It unveils works by 9 Belgian artists and invites visitors to discover their unique approaches between mystery and fascination, traces of psycho-sensory experiences, transparency and opacity, presence and absence. By revealing the multiple temporalities of the work from its creation to its observation, the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday is transcended. Proof of this is that the form of the contemporary work of art extends beyond its material form. It is a connecting element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. Like a point on a line more or less visible to the naked eye¹.
The paradoxical title Traces de l’invisible questions the very genesis of art: would this make the invisible visible? Although this question will remain open, the exhibition bases and paraphrases the precepts of the phenomenology of perception and refutes the prejudice of the objective world and objective reality². In other words, it is not the visible that is decisive in a work, but rather the form of the connections that the artist and the viewer make. This approach considers perception in terms of the viewer’s communication or communion with the work.³
It is this experience of “seeing as a feeling” that is offered to the visitor of Traces de l’invisible.
¹ Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle, Les presses du réel, 2001, p.21.
² Carine Fol, Distant proximity, CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels, 2014
³ Ibidem
Vivarium, a project by the artist Alfonse, Paul et les Autres at CENTRALE | vitrine (09.12.2021 > 13.03.2022), is a space that confronts commercialstaging and spectacular presentation of nature. The project aims to appeal to passers-by from the street, making the relationship between the window/showcase and the viewer a significant element of the installation. A polite universe of bourgeois decoration will be shaken up by the presence of disproportionate representations of plants drawn on the scale of the space, recreating an artificial jungle. Halfway between girly decoration and prostitutional staging, these elements will contribute to establishing an underlying sexual tension in this “vivarium” crossed by contradictory energies.
As a child of “creolisation”, David Ayoun develops work that explores and questions the transformation of the body and its perceptions in its relationship to technique and memory. His practice is situated at the crossroads of image and dance, language and the unconscious, ritual and dream. Through a principle of sensitive and burlesque displacement, he deploys the fragility of simple or virtuoso, digital or archaic gestures.
His installations are designed to enter into dialogue with architecture. The viewers are solicited in their perceptions, their bodily awareness and their mobility. Ayoun pays particular attention to frame, space, time and sound. Several of his collaborations with artists, researchers, choreographers, music composers or digital programmers contribute to the construction of a project that transcend both genres and disciplines.
In fold, a series of pieces enter into dialogue in the exhibition space, articulated around the notion of folding. The fold of a body, of a limb, of a fabric, the fold of an image or a sculpture… Immersed in the exhibition space, the visitor’s body resonates with the installation, questioning the reality and virtuality of the space in which our bodies are potentially (dis)incarnated.
“fold plays with an ambiguity between verb and noun. Between a call to action, an act or a result. The notion runs through the exhibition in waves, ranging from the
lines unfurled from a body over which you can run your fingers, the broken lines of tilted mirrors, right through to compressing inflated objects … everything is a matter of fold. Bouncing on space hoppers, listening to a five-voice madrigal and faced with moving images that echo them, visitors are immersed in the installation.
Come in and fold a fraction of the time-space…” – David Ayoun
Laureate 2021 Watch this space, Contemporary art Biennale coordinated by 50° nord, contemporary art network
Associate artist at la malterie, Lille
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
CENTRALE presents the exhibition La Vie matérielle (09.12.2021 > 13.03.2022), a dialogue between 12 Italian and Belgian artists on the link between art and life.
La Vie matérielle, named after the book of the same name by Marguerite Duras, explores and relates the artistic journey to personal experience.
Both Duras’ book and the works in the exhibition are defined by a constant dialogue between ordinary everyday life (of which the body is a crucial element) and the inner, intimate life, torn between its deepest aspirations and reality.
By reusing, hybridising, diverting or decontextualizing organic materials and everyday objects and giving them a new life that transcends their usual use, the artists in the exhibition bridge the divide between artistic disciplines.
Through provocative or questioning narratives, fragile or energetic stagings, these very diverse works (assemblages, videos, drawings, sculptures, installations) blend the finished and the unfinished, the knowing and the sensing.
The exhibition integrates and explores several senses, in particular vision and touch, through a journey that takes the viewer inside a kind of emotional and mental spider’s web, hoping that at the end of the journey, we will have gained new perspectives on how we perceive and read our shared ‘material world’, and the link that art allows us to create between our body and our inner world.
A collaboration between Palazzo Magnani Foundation (Reggio Emilia) and CENTRALE for contemporary art (Brussels)
This exhibition, proposed in 2018-2019 in its Italian version at the Palazzo da Mosto by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation in Reggio Emilia under the curatorship of Marina Dacci, has been redesigned for CENTRALE in collaboration with its artistic director Carine Fol and is part of an exchange through the presentation of Sophie Whettnall’s exhibition Universo Dentro at the Chiostri di San Pietro from May to July 2021.
From G to B to K and C (Katelijne, Catherine, Kairos and Cairo)
Fromto
CENTRALE | lab
The project From G to B to K and C (Katelijne, Catherine, Kairos and Cairo) (30.09 > 30.01.2022) presented by Juan Pablo Plazas at CENTRALE | lab stems from different needs that are symptomatic of the times we are living in: the urge to meet, to have contact, to share space, to exchange perspectives, opinions or simple stories. For Plazas, stories are paths leading to what otherwise cannot be perceived about people, places or situations. The title with initials refers to a dynamics of impressions, fragments of things, narratives and material evidence collected to inhabit the exhibition space as a work-in-progress, taking into account fellow artists, visitors, people who work in the art centre, and the here and now.
“I guess you’re familiar with the concept of initials, the first letter of a word that stands for the rest of the letters. My initials are JP, for example. There is something very personal and public at the same time about initials. JP are my initials but so are they to someone called Jean-Pierre, to an investment bank, to a brand of wines, and to the Justice and Peace services of many cities. A simple letter could represent the initials of someone’s name, the name of a place and the short version of a concept or an organization. This could be confusing sometimes if you don’t know what the letter is referring to. It could also be a very clear sign of how a person could also be a territory, an organization could be just a concept, or a place could mean a person to someone.” JPP
At CENTRALE | lab, Juan Pablo Plazas conceives an in situ installation which includes works made by fellow artists and deals with the specificity of CENTRALE | lab’s architecture. Bringing to mind climbing walls, Plazas’ presentation walls become new cases holding coloured shapes and objects – some made by Plazas, some borrowed or received – brought together to co-inhabit in the exhibition space.
Angyvir Padilla, simultaneously showing at CENTRALE | vitrine, is part of this sharing and exchanging process as one of her self-made objects becomes part of Juan Pablo Plazas’ new installation.
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
Home contains us and is within us # Ste Catherine 13
Fromto
Centrale | vitrine
Angyvir Padilla presents the project Home contains us and is within us # Ste Catherine 13 (30.09 > 21.11.2021) at CENTRALE | vitrine.
Angyvir Padilla inaugurates the space of CENTRALE | vitrine at 13 rue Sainte-Catherine with her project Home contains us and is within us # Ste Catherine 13. CENTRALE | vitrine is dedicated to emerging artists living in Brussels on the basis of an open call for IN SITU projects, which take into account the urban environment, the street (pedestrian), the neighbourhood, the inhabitants, and the passers. The vitrine hyphenates indoors and outdoors, CENTRALE and the public space, art and life.
For Home contains us and is within us # Ste Catherine 13, Angyvir Padilla proposes an installation consisting of a new floor entirely covered with plastic sheets, which becomes the decor and the receptacle for clay objects referring to those found in a household. The notions of time, memory and home run through the exhibition space. The artist, at times, performs in the space where she develops her work in progress. Her movements – walking, watering the clay, modelling the objects, placing them, etc. – are captured by a camera and retransmitted onto a screen as part of the installation, visible from the street at all times.
One of the sculptures created by Angyvir Padilla in CENTRALE | vitrine will be recontextualized by the artist Juan Pablo Plazas in his own exhibition, simultaneously on display at CENTRALE | lab.
For BXL UNIVERSEL II: multipli.city, the duo Effi & Amir joins forces with Suleiman, Mohamed, Musa, Pacifique, Sayed, Louis, Habib, Joël, Edwin, and Ahmed and propose A Hypothesis of a Door, a participatory project, an exhibition and a radio show. Together, they propose to a group of people – newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers, in the process of settling in Belgium or in transit – to invest the space of CENTRALE.lab, to be its hosts. In order to become hosts, these guests decide on the purpose of the place, its layout, its operation.
From this reappropriated space, between the exhibition and the recording studio, they in turn welcome guests, both visitors and people of their choice. In this way, they meet the people of Brussels in a new arrangement.
In the documentary project Deuxième saison, photographers Mathilde Mahoudeau and Lucas Castel explore through image and sound the various issues related to the possible re-opening of a mining site in Ariège (France).
The exhibition mixes the photographic medium with a sound piece, the results of testimonies collected on site. In February 2020, a first version of Deuxième saison was presented at the Wolubilis Cultural Centre in Brussels for the exhibition Médiatine, for which the artist duo was awarded the City of Brussels Prize. In 2021, a new version of Deuxième saison is exhibited at CENTRALE.box. On this occasion, Lucas Castel and Mathilde Mahoudeau present a self-edition bringing together the different pieces of their documentary. The project is also presented at 104 in Paris, as part of the Circulation(s) festival from 13 March to 2 May 2021.
Yvonne De Grazia’s exhibition (born in Saarbrücken, Germany. Lives and works in Brussels) Danger… it’s what you run away from (25.03 > 06.06.2021) conveys a visual proposal that combines collective past and individual memory.
Excerpts from Felix Salten’s book A life in the Woods, and its animated film adaptation by Walt Disney (Bambi) are the essential elements of this work. These are associated with the coldness, glamorous and powerful post-war imagery. Using random images from the web (fast-web search) Yvonne De Grazia recolours, disguises, retraces, copies or analyses images and colours, blurring the viewer’s gaze and inviting him to take a step back. The installation includes paper prints, textile design, drawing, video and sound.
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