Tour around Ghent: TRACK, Sint-Jan and "Esta puerta pide clavo" at Galerie Tatjana Pieters
Fri, Jun 22 2012
Described as "a contemporary city conversation" and "a unique art experience in the city of Ghent", TRACK enjoys the participation of around 40 artists that present (more or less) site specific works in/around the Belgium city, organised in several 'clusters' (Tondelier, Tolhuis, Macharius, Centrum, Blandijn and Citadel).
TRACK was initiated by the S.M.A.K. (it is curated by its artistic director, Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis, curator at Kunsthaus Zürich) with the aim of continuing the tradition of two exhibition projects also organised by S.M.A.K.: the seminal Chambres d’Amis (curated by Jan Hoet in 1986), a show that exhibited art private houses around Ghent, and Over the Edges (2000, curated by Jan Hoet and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio), which took the idea of the corner as a starting point, or as the curators put it "the boundary between interior and exterior, between indoors and outdoors, between private and public".
Nearby Pilvi Takala's work was the video work by Swiss artists Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller, which we sadly missed as TRACK sites are closed on Mondays. Keller & Hemauer talk about 'The Postpetrolistic Internationale' choir piece here.
Their work began back in 2009 in Basel and has had iterations in Rotterdam (Latitudes' project 'Portscapes') and a year later in Aarhus, Denmark, where the piece was part of Hemauer/Keller's solo show "United Alternative Energies" (also curated by Latitudes). 'The Postpetrolistic Internationale' will be part of the group exhibition 'Ballena Negra' in late 2012 in MARCO Vigo, as part of the 10 year anniversary of the Prestige oil spill.
Lara Almarcegui's 700m3 "Concrete Mountain" in the Tondelier cluster.
The artist speaks about her work in this video.
Pascale Marthine-Tayou, "Le défi" (2012).
[from the website] "On 16 August 2009 the Jamaican Usain Bolt took the world record for the
10-metre sprint to an unreal 9.58 seconds. In 2012 Pascale Marthine
Tayou has laid out a single-lane athletics track in the heart of the
Tondelier district. Until the 1960s, this part of Ghent had been full of
working industries. Although most of the factories have since been
demolished or put to new use, one can even now still read the history of
this neighbourhood in its eroded urban skin. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s "Le défi" is a red gravel track that comes to a dead end at a wall. It is
clear how the work is to be read and used, but the consequences are
ambiguous. Le défi will not be recognised as an artwork by most of the
local residents. It is a playful but meditative reflection on the
significance of sport, the acceptance of a challenge and the generation
of social change and emancipation. In this way, Pascale Marthine Tayou
has created ‘an image’ of both the global, Olympic heroism of a world
record and the minor hitches facing every individual."
Teresa Margolles' Mesa y dos bancos (Table and Two Benches), 2012 in the Tondelier cluster.
"For TRACK [Margolles] had a public picnic bench cast in cement. She mixes this neutral substance with the water extracted from cloths that had been used to clean up the blood of victims of the Mexican drug war from the streets."
[from the website] "‘Search and Destroy’ is not only the title of a hit by the 70s nihilistic American punk band The Stooges, but also a military strategy first employed in the Vietnam War. To Garabedian, this phrase refers to the way the history of a place is handled and the way a fracture in the past continues to torment the present."
"The starting point for [his multi-part work] ‘Spectres’ is the murder of Patrice Lumumba a few
months after his election victory in the Congo in 1960. For TRACK,
Augustijnen sought in vain for the tree against which Lumumba was shot.
It had probably been chopped down to make charcoal. In the Citadel Park,
Augustijnen sets up an installation in which this charcoal – an
indispensable source of income but also a symbolic remnant of the tree –
is transported by bicycle, a ‘typically’ Congolese means of conveyance.
Augustijnen deliberately located this installation near the ‘Moorken’.
This small black sculpture on top of artificial rocks in the Citadel
Park dates from 1888 and is a reminder of the time when the Congo was
still Leopold II’s private pleasure garden. The ‘Moorken’ portrays the
Congolese boy Sakala, whom the pioneer Lieven Van de Velde brought back
to Belgium in 1884."
'Esta puerta pide clavo' (2 June–19 August 2012), is a group show curated by Rivet (Manuela Moscoso & Sarah Demeuse) with the participation of: Philippe van Snick, Lorea Alfaro, Rey Akdogan, June Crespo, Rubén Grilo, David Jablonowski, Lisa Oppenheim, Kiko Pérez, Asaha Schechter, Daniel Steegman-Magrané and Batia Suter.
[From the press release]
"Based on an idiom that literally translates as 'This door asks for a nail,' Esta puerta pide clavo not only highlights an economy of means that informed the making of the selected works but also emphasizes the equipment-like agency of matter over and above hermeneutics. One strand of "Esta puerta pide clavo" veers towards abstraction, possibly echoing a common language of design as well as artistic actions from the 20th-century."
[From the press release]
"Based on an idiom that literally translates as 'This door asks for a nail,' Esta puerta pide clavo not only highlights an economy of means that informed the making of the selected works but also emphasizes the equipment-like agency of matter over and above hermeneutics. One strand of "Esta puerta pide clavo" veers towards abstraction, possibly echoing a common language of design as well as artistic actions from the 20th-century."
(...) "David Jablonowski's sculptures [photo above and below] awkwardly materialize and juxtapose processes of scanning with generic computer visualization, digitized archival imagery as well as what look like casts spat out by 3-D printers."
"Equally focused on intermediary material components and backgrounds in the process of photography, Lisa Oppenheim's unique photograms resemble digitally designed patterns while being the repositories of a darkroom interpretation of Victorian flower arrangements."
"The other strand insists on specificity of materials and imagery. June Crespo's precise scans provide the source material for layered sculptures that force the object-image into three-dimensionality and volume."
Lambda print on PVC, metal rivets, plastic and spray, textile. 100x70cm.
"Philippe van
Snick's Kleurmachine, though made in the 1970s, foreshadows a similar
language of generic abstraction. (...) Van Snick's photography simultaneously fuses object and processed
image, similarly collapsing two- and three-dimensionality."
Catedral of Sint–Jan in the center of Ghent.
Jan Hoet and Hans Martens curated Sint–Jan (until 29 July 2012), an exhibition running paralel to TRACK,
in which 51 artists present their work around spirituality and religion
at the Saint-Bavo's Cathedral in the center of Ghent. The artist list
includes Kris Martin, Navid Nuur, Michaël Boremans, Abdel Abdessemed,
Berlinde De Bruyckere, Bruce Nauman, David Adamo, Luciano Fabro, Mandla
Reuter, Marlene Dumas, Wim Delvoye…
Mandla Reuter (on the wall, a Rubens).
David Adamo in one of the side chapels.
Adel Abdessemed (in the crypt)
Luciano Fabro (in the crypt)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
