Foreign Places
18 Jun - 14 Aug 2016
FOREIGN PLACES
18 June – 14 August 2016
Curated by Grégory Castéra (Council, Paris) & Caroline Dumalin (WIELS)
Global migrations, mass tourism and labour mobility dominate public debate today. We are increasingly compelled to see the world through the lens of our contemporary conditions of itinerancy. Many of the residents at WIELS know these conditions intimately, which inflect their work in myriad ways.
Foreign Places brings together eight artists, all formerly in residence at WIELS, whose work builds upon temporary but dedicated ‘acts of attachment’ to a specific or imagined place. Even when on familiar ground, these urban explorers take to the streets in order to probe the city’s multiple concentrations and historical layers, and give them new uses, forms, or narratives. Some deliberately seek out remote, symbolic sites – from Athens to Accra – to research and produce their work in collaboration with local inhabitants and workers.
As a result, the exhibition emphasizes a host of practices that in a first stage do not rely on a traditional, or ‘fixed’, studio environment, but instead draw inspiration from the context in which the artists situate themselves. Foreign Places confronts their distinctive ways of imagining the city and their differing ethics of working with a place, from its larger social fabric to its seemingly marginal manifestations.
With Eglė Budvytytė, Sara Deraedt, Patricia Esquivias, Beatrice Gibson with Alex Waterman, HAiKW/ Toril Johannessen, Fiona Mackay, Emma van der Put, Robin Vanbesien
With the support of Mondriaan Fund, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Wilgelover
18 June – 14 August 2016
Curated by Grégory Castéra (Council, Paris) & Caroline Dumalin (WIELS)
Global migrations, mass tourism and labour mobility dominate public debate today. We are increasingly compelled to see the world through the lens of our contemporary conditions of itinerancy. Many of the residents at WIELS know these conditions intimately, which inflect their work in myriad ways.
Foreign Places brings together eight artists, all formerly in residence at WIELS, whose work builds upon temporary but dedicated ‘acts of attachment’ to a specific or imagined place. Even when on familiar ground, these urban explorers take to the streets in order to probe the city’s multiple concentrations and historical layers, and give them new uses, forms, or narratives. Some deliberately seek out remote, symbolic sites – from Athens to Accra – to research and produce their work in collaboration with local inhabitants and workers.
As a result, the exhibition emphasizes a host of practices that in a first stage do not rely on a traditional, or ‘fixed’, studio environment, but instead draw inspiration from the context in which the artists situate themselves. Foreign Places confronts their distinctive ways of imagining the city and their differing ethics of working with a place, from its larger social fabric to its seemingly marginal manifestations.
With Eglė Budvytytė, Sara Deraedt, Patricia Esquivias, Beatrice Gibson with Alex Waterman, HAiKW/ Toril Johannessen, Fiona Mackay, Emma van der Put, Robin Vanbesien
With the support of Mondriaan Fund, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Wilgelover