In keeping with its mission of championing contemporary creation in Brussels in an international context, the CENTRALE for contemporary art has invited Overtoon, a Brussels platform that researches, produces and distributes sound art, to come up with an original project that sheds light on a multidisciplinary niche in the field of contemporary art.

Founded by Aernoudt Jacobs and Christoph De Boeck, assisted by Saartje Geerts, Overtoon produces and distributes visual creations based on sound and offers production and research residences to creators from Brussels, Belgium and abroad.

To do justice to this invitation, Overtoon has invited Nicole Gingras, curator of international renown who has been interested for many years in the links between sound and image and in listening as a way of entering into a relationship with the world.

“Where are sounds and where do they go? This double question, so simple at first sight, reveals several essential aspects about listening. First, there is this predisposition, or rather faculty, of the listener to perceive any sound event, big or small. Second, these questions allow us to examine the ways in which sounds manifest themselves and travel through a given space, in public places or during our daily wanderings.

Many artists explore sound, its relationship with time and space, the singular relationship that ties sound in with memory, the association between silence and presence, between breath and movement. Some work with and in sound, probing the intensity of a sonic mass, its materiality, its volume. Others are interested in aural traces or try to capture the near-inaudible or imperceptible. Some translate a sound phenomenon into an image, an object, a sculpture, a perceptual and temporal experience. Others propose silent but sound-bearing images, relying on the power of words to fuel the imagination.

Exploring the act of listening through such notions as spatial acoustics, the listening body, the body-receptor and aural images, Où sont les sons? Where Are Sounds ? suggests that it is not only possible to hear a sound but also to see it, touch it, be pervaded by it. Listening takes time, demands time. While listening, the subject’s body oscillates between various states: vigilant, alert and in discovery mode, or distracted, floating and scattered.

The exhibition at the CENTRALE features sixteen artists. The selected works were created between 1982 and 2017, several of which were created specifically for this exhibition. From one work to the next, visitors may thus witness experiments that are at once distinct and complementary, all part of the continuum that characterizes sound works and their processes. “

Nicole Gingras
Curator of the exhibition

Où sont les Sons ? Where are Sounds? Extra muros

The Heliophone of Aernoudt Jacobs will be shown in the Musical Instruments Museum
19-04 > 02-07 2017
www.mim.be

See also:

Another artwork by Christoph De Boeck, Floating Beam, at the exhibition Murmur in Netwerk – Centre for contemporary art (Aalst).
08-04 > 02-07 2017
www.netwerk-art.be

The whirling tops installation of Lawrence Malstaf in the scenography which the visual artist made for the piece Nachtelijk Symposium, programmed at KVS
19-04 > 26-04 2017
kvs.be

© Katerina UNDO, Whole expansion © Photo : Renaud Schrobilgten

Collection,
Recovery,
Reworking, are the central themes of the work of this artist from Marseille, who has been experimenting with different media since her initial studies in illustration at the Erg school in Brussels and then painting studies at La Cambre.

From engraving to video, from paper to canvas, from wood to metal, Maëlle Maisonneuve, born in 1988, (re)collects, paints and draws and then destroys her pieces so she can reconstruct them.

Having survived her workshop at the B.A.D (Belgian Artist District) where she left last year to earn a living as a resident artist, notably in India as part of the ‘Programme of Exchange in Culture and Art of Himalayas (PECAH); her paintings reveal their undersides here. Tetris 2, un vrai mensonge is made up of interchangeable panels and various small objects from the artist’s personal collection.

Constantly changing in relation to the space it occupies, this work has its basis in a curatorial presentation from Les Interstices cycle (in the context of the CARE Executive Master’s in exhibiting practice organised by the Royal Academy for Fine Arts in Brussels, in collaboration with the CENTRALE). It can only be seen in the window at rue Sainte-Catherine 13.

“At night time, the work looks different, and between the frames the artist promises her love to all pretenders, to all promises in vain that surround us, just before leaving at the end of September to be a resident artist in Iceland, this time with Listhús at the Skammdegi festival.” – Maëlle Delaplanche.

© Maëlle MAISONNEUVE