The exhibition RADIANT CITY presents Anne Van Boxelaere’s recent work from her series ‘Agreement’, a reflection on the tension between humanity and system, between beauty and control.
The title of the exhibition refers to Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Radieuse’ (‘Radiant City’), an unrealised modernist urban design from 1930. This visionary plan, intended as a ‘radiant city’ for modern humanity, stands as a symbol of an intensified rational and controlling state apparatus. A nightmarish vision in which order, discipline, and cold efficiency prevail over human warmth and vitality. Le Corbusier’s colleague Hugo Häring described it as a future vision “organised like a Prussian military world: orderly, aligned, disciplined, but cold.”
Anne Van Boxelaere deliberately chooses this title as a counterpoint. Where Radiant City suggests a promise of progress and harmony, she reveals the underlying inhumanity: a world in which systems and rules take precedence, and where beauty and connection disappear into the whirlwind of bureaucracy and administration.
