print Summer 2018

Hiwa K

One of the stronger works on view in last year’s Documenta 14 was When We Were Exhaling Images, 2017, Hiwa K’s installation consisting of a stack of large clay drainage pipes. In one pipe—each had a diameter of roughly three feet—viewers found a used washing table; in others, an unmade bed, some furniture, and daily utensils. The work evoked an absurd housing project for refugees. The artist, who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, fled his native country during the Gulf War of 1990–91. Traveling by foot through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, he ended up in what became his new home country,

print January 2018

Kendell Geers

One of Kendell Geers’s most iconic works is his Self-Portrait, 1995: half of a broken Heineken beer bottle, ready to be used as a weapon, bearing a label reading IMPORTED FROM HOLLAND. As the work of a white male South African descendant of Dutch colonizers, this simple object encapsulates two of the major and returning themes of Geers’s art: violence and identity. In this recent pair of exhibitions in Brussels, both titled “AfroPunk,” he showed his own work alongside traditional African art to create compelling variations on his recurring concerns.

The show at Rodolphe Janssen included a huge

print September 2017

Patrick Van Caeckenbergh

In his exhibition “Les Loques de Chagrin” (The Rags of Grief), Patrick Van Caeckenbergh seemed to create his own universe by staging an eclectic group of works and installations that at first appeared to eschew clear interconnections. In an installation near the entrance, one saw three snakeskins filled with eggs, hanging vertically from an iron broom handle. It seemed that something had dripped out of these dead bodies into two chamber pots placed under the ends of the snakes’ tails. This eerie assemblage was accompanied by works including a sort of small sideboard, a display cabinet, an

print March 2017

Carsten Höller

The Belgian-German artist Carsten Höller is best known for large-scale installations that invite the viewer to participate in or activate them. But his recent exhibition “Videoretrospective with Two Lightmachines” showed another side of his work. The complex and layered show started with Light Wall IV, 2007. LED lamps went rapidly on and off, accompanied by hard stereophonic sounds of clicking, thus evoking a disorienting stroboscopic effect. According to the artist, this disconcerting welcome was intended to put the visitor in a dreamy mood that would allow her to comprehend reality in a

print Summer 2016

Jan Van Imschoot

Jan Van Imschoot is an artist’s artist, admired and respected by his colleagues but, regrettably, little known to a broader audience. The fact that he has opted for a kind of voluntary exile in the countryside of northern France doesn’t help either. But he is one of the best Flemish painters of his generation. For his latest exhibition, “Le jugement de Pâris à Bruxelles” (The Judgment of Paris in Brussels), he took a cue from Greek mythology. Paris was the Trojan shepherd prince who had to judge which of the Greek goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite deserved the golden apple with the inscription

print April 2016

Jef Cornelis

The importance of what Jef Cornelis produced during his career at the BRT—the Belgian Radio and Television company, later renamed the Flemish Radio and Television company—can hardly be overestimated. Between 1964 and 1998, Cornelis directed more than two hundred documentaries, film essays, and live broadcasts on modern art, architecture, and other topics in the cultural domain. “Inside the White Tube. A Retrospective View on the Television Work of Jef Cornelis” gave an overwhelming image of four decades of television historiography. Although today it is tempting to look at this exhibition

print November 2015

“Atopolis”

One of the two European cultural capitals of 2015, Mons was the perfect place for “Atopolis,” an awesome exhibition of twenty-three artists, organized by Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. The show’s theme was the possibility of an ideal city in a globalized yet fragmented world. Mons was one of the first European cities to play a major role in industrialization; huge territories in and around the city were devoted to mining—and to housing the many foreign guest workers who were brought there. Around the coal mines, various nationalities lived together in specially designed communities,

print October 2015

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

When this year’s Venice Biennale director, Okwui Enwezor, asked Lili Reynaud-Dewar to propose a project, she produced My Epidemic (small modest bad blood opera), 2015. The theme of this “opera” is a reflection on AIDS, starting with a famous case from the beginning of the 2000s, when the French writer Guillaume Dustan was attacked by Didier Lestrade, a founding member of ACT UP Paris, for claiming that it was his personal and legal right to have unsafe sex and write about it.

Reynaud-Dewar, who teaches at HEAD (Haute École d’Art et de Design) in Geneva, often works with different partners as part

print Summer 2015

Jonathan Meese

Jonathan Meese is nothing if not hyper-energetic. For his most recent exhibition, the German artist covered nearly all the available wall space with no fewer than twenty paintings, thirty-three drawings, and a thirteen-page manifesto on what art is, what it isn’t, and what it should be. What’s more, almost everything in “Spitzenmeesige Women (Schniddeldiddelson)”—the nonsense title of this exhibition, like those of many of the individual works, is untranslatable despite incorporating recognizable bits of German and English—was produced this year. This overwhelming assemblage resembled,

print January 2015

Bruce High Quality Foundation

In 2003, a group of Cooper Union alumni formed an organization to maintain and promote the artistic legacy of “Bruce High Quality,” a fictional artist who died in the 9/11 attacks. Since then, the Foundation has brought the gospel of Bruce to the Whitney Biennial as well as to shows at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Brooklyn Museum, to name a few. For their exhibition in Brussels, the collective produced an impressive installation that referenced two of Belgium’s best-known artists.

“Vive la Sociale!” was based on—among other things—James Ensor’s famous painting

print September 2014

Mark Manders

It was in 1986 that Mark Manders began using the term “Self-Portrait as a Building” to describe the project he is still pursuing today: a never-ending accumulation of works—sculptures, installations, and so on—that interact with or comment on one another. In his recent show in Antwerp, Manders presented the latest chapter in this ongoing story, another wing in the edifice of this ever-growing oeuvre.

In Parallel Occurrences / Documented Assignments, the catalogue published in 2010 on the occasion of a traveling exhibition organized by the Aspen Art Museum and the Hammer Museum, Manders

print March 2014

Tony Oursler

Tony Oursler has taken Belgium by storm. “Glare Schematics,” at Galerie Albert Baronian, one of two impressive exhibitions recently on view in that country, was a crowded and outrageous mixture of works on paper and mixed-media sculpture, depicting happy people, devils, talking masks, and more. Among the sculptures were four wall-mounted, branching metal structures that evoke family trees—send-ups, maybe, of the seriousness of those who try to go back in time and rediscover their forefathers. In Oursler’s world, this is a perfect starting point for putting together sometimes absurd combinations

Jos Van den Bergh