BOVENKAMER
04.04 - 01.05.2021
1. Thomas Verstraeten
Cinecittà 2060 (2021)
Inspired by the gigantic model in the NATIONAL SHOW-MUSEUM (the Grand Maket Rossiya) in St. Petersburg, Thomas Verstraeten made a model of the neighborhood where he lives, the Seefhoek in Antwerp-North. It is a place that inspires him every day and invites him to make new performances, videos and installations. He has not created a realistic model of the Seefhoek, but rather a model as a theater set annex film studio where all his future artistic plans and dreams for this neighborhood have found a place.
Model realization: Winnie Claessens, Marthe Cornelissen, Anton Leysen, Mark Van Oijstaeijen, Elleke Frijters, Thomas Verstraeten.
With thanks to the Flemish government.
2. Toon Leën
Zwischen den Bildern (2020)
Duur: 13’50”
Zwischen den Bildern is a portrait of an anonymous artist, played by Ludovik Vermeersch. The video was commissioned by KIOSK in Ghent, where it was shown in the group exhibition x from January 23 - March 28, 2021. For the exhibition BOVENKAMER at Fred & Ferry, the work has been installed alongside a collage of photographs that feature in the video.
With: Ludovik Vermeersch, Anna Königshofer, Jan-Holger Hennies
Camera: Jan-Holger Hennies and Toon Leën
Directed and edited by: Toon Leën
Music: Sviatoslav Ishkanov
Commissioned by KIOSK
Thanks to: Ying Sze Pek, Lea Hilsemer, Zhenja Schmidt, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Jan Trautmann, Simon Delobel
3. Frank&Robbert Robbert&Frank
Ballenmachine (2019)
To break the window of opportunity: Frank and Robbert climb the pole (2014 – 2020)
Mayan Hieroglyphics 1 (2009 - 2012)
Series of silkscreenprint: 3D printed artist duo on the Great Wall of China (Hebei Province) (2020)
Frank&Robbert Robbert&Frank play with their own representation and identity. They intertwine the personal with the professional. Many of their creations arise through trial and error, repetition and transformation. This explains their penchant for series and editions. Their intervention in the exhibition is a direct reference to this. They combine an old work - a ‘Mayan Hieroglyphic’ in which an inkjet printer was used painterly to build up an image layer by layer - with a handful of recent screen prints. The silkscreens show the same image each time, but due to the artists’ artisanal printing technique, it is always different for each work. They try to be identical. But because of the nature of the medium, they are not. Flaws in the screen printing process and the layer-on-layer structure create new shapes, colors and patterns. Just like the makers’ own practice: seemingly the same yet with new variations each time.
R&F F&R’s ball machine fits perfectly into the research domain of the artist duo, which focuses on humor, power play and the “homo ludens” (man at play). Their machine doesn’t simply distribute industrialized objects of mass production, but... each ball contains a mini piece of art or a small magical handmade talisman.
4. Leyla Aydoslu
Construction XLIX (2015)
No Title, (2018)
LXXXV (2018)
Aydoslu’s work is often a deconstruction of architectural elements adapted to the scale of the human body and of the space where the work is shown.
The artist looks for objects of possible interest in the streets, often remnants of building materials, which she then converts experimentally into constructions and sculptural installations that may be both robust and elegant. While respecting the properties of the material, during the creative process she looks for ways of linking the various elements together to the point where a sense of tension arises.
The mould and the cast – negative and positive space – make frequent appearances in her oeuvre. The works have a directness and urgency that is not founded on a theoretical or conceptual discourse.
5. Mirthe Klück
No title (2020)
No title (2020)
Feather light (2020)
Mirthe Klück is interested in combinations. She makes associative connections between material, composition and texture. The starting point of her work is often a simple idea or something very commonplace. But it can also begin with the choice of a certain material, such as sackcloth, Styrofoam, or a specific medium, such as painting or collage. Klück zooms in on these elements, to give expression to the technical, conceptual, even abstract side of everyday perception. The result is an image without narrative; of meaning behind the image. The work explores the formal properties of the image and the ‘in-between space’. Within that context, Klück specializes in the spatial qualities of the flat surface and that which lies behind it. She refers to this with the term ‘dry’. Klück asks herself: “can the artist add meaning to seemingly uneventful things, make the impersonal personal?” Or, as Hagakure would put it, can she treat matters of small concern with due respect? (Steven van Teeseling)
6. Antoine Waterkeyn / Helmut Stallaerts
La Marquise sortit à 5 Heures, la Comtesse prit le Train de 8 Heures (2020)
“And I thought, when those two gentlemen would die and arrive naked before the Lord’s court, and be forgotten here. And that fearfully weighty lords would come after them. And whether they would keep their stupid aplomb if they arrived up there without their polished shoes? And how would it go with those neat partings in their hair? And whether they would then come out with their stupid display of majority, whether there wouldn’t be a little thing to read on those faces, when they would meet there those other, even more weighty gentlemen, whom they had held in high esteem for so many years, also naked?”
(from Titans, pp. 33-34, Nescio)
7. Zoro Feigl
Hoop (prototype) (2016)
A constant in Zoro Feigl’s work are circles and loops while in everything else, the universe proceeds in twisting motions. In his installations, the continuous, circling dynamics create a calming effect and encourages our mesmerized viewing.
The prototype for Hoop illustrates this very aptly: hoops run back and forth, like a child’s game. Sometimes they collide and sometimes they dance gracefully in perfect harmony. The smaller hoops glide effortlessly through the larger ones, constantly interfering with and accentuating each other’s movements in a rhythmic choreography.
This is a model for the 9 meter long version that is in the collection of Rijksmuseum Twenthe.
8. Liesbeth Henderickx
A constant dropping wears away a stone (2017)
Liesbeth Henderickx likes to work with the writing of stones, what it tells about our history but also what people like to read or think they see in it, such as a reflection of the contemporary world or an indescribable encounter with beauty. Just as she likes to use the granito technique to freeze, capture a collection of stones.
Concrete and natural stone are the materials that shape her oeuvre, sometimes in collaboration but often in relation to each other and in relation to their position within architectural history. The shaping of objects in her work is often generated from a distance through the use of polishers that mimic ebb and flow and thus determine the shaping.
9. Anne Van Boxelaere
Lab (2021)
Just as her series of paintings of office buildings often evoke alienation and discomfort, her recent work Lab also creates an uncomfortable feeling without us effectively dwelling on it. On the one hand, the work depicts a sterile environment (although the painting is not painted so sterile) with amorphous individuals, stripped of their identity, purely functional in a fixed structure, without freedom of movement. And on the other hand, there is still the issue of corona, and our contemporary ability to use scientific research and teamwork to defeat an invisible enemy.
10. Jana Coorevits
Flank (2020)
As I disappear into landscape, my favorite state of undress (2021)
Duration: 28”
Thanks you: Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, Charlotte Van den Broeck, Nicolas Keppens and Maxim Hectors
The artistic practice of Jana Coorevits starts from research into narrative techniques in literature, film and photography.
Currently she is studying how landscape can play a role in the representation of traumatic events. We could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) (J. Berger): Jana Coorevits uses film and photography to construct a contemplative space, inside which such traumatic experiences may be perceived in a multitude of ways and can therefore be examined in depth.
In ‘As I disappear into landscape, my favorite state of undress’ a photographic image of a landscape is reduced to its sensory qualities: colors, shapes and textures. The camera moves into the depths of the image: an extreme zoom goes into the matter of the digital image, into the pixel, the digital information that forms the image. Gradually, through the digital pixel and the analog grain, the camera makes a move toward the matter of the landscape itself.
