2019 fall programme

Gabriel Kuri: sorted, resorted
September 6, 2019-January 5, 2020
Opening: September 5, 2019

Material and information: today, in our world of mass production and distribution, we are drowning in both. Making sense of either has become a process of sifting, of categorizing. Taking an iconoclastic approach to his first institutional solo show in his adopted home of Brussels, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri sorts and resorts his work according to its physical or metaphorical material. As if ready to be recycled, over 60 sculptures and installations are reclassified as either metal, paper, plastic or construction materials. This strictly logical yet absurd taxonomy highlights simultaneously the diversity of Kuri’s formal approach and the consistency of his underlying themes: notions of commercial and cultural value, consumerism, as well as material and poetic (mis)use.

The exhibition functions as an extension of Kuri’s practice, which in itself is a system for sorting. It is accompanied by a book whose design draws upon the formal language of indexing, such as the rolodex, binder file, or library index card. The curatorial essay by Zoë Gray examines Kuri’s sorting principles. Brian Dillon dives into the comedy of materials that define our contemporary world. And Cathleen Chaffee maps the connections to place and time found throughout Kuri’s itinerant, international practice.

Published by WIELS, Brussels and Koenig Books, London
Designed by: OK-RM (London)
In English (with translations in Dutch and French)
ISBN 978-3-96098-685-0

With the support of:
Fund David Dime & Elisa Nuyten managed by the KBF Foundation Canada
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Galleria Franco Noero, Turin
Esther Schipper, Berlin
Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York
Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo
The Henry Moore Foundation

Open Skies
September 27, 2019–January 5, 2020
Opening: September 26, 2019

The demands of transparency are far-reaching: expose, identify and align oneself, trade intimacy and authenticity for control, profit or security. The group exhibition Open Skies questions this ever louder call for transparency, with work by seven emerging artists who explore our public and private spaces of supposed freedom. They create works that play with veils and masks, codes and currencies, projections and fantasies. Some employ a layering of images, stripping and deconstructing standardized tropes to provide alternative realities. Others challenge the supposed transparency of language, revelling in its slippages.

The exhibition’s title evokes the stock images used as digital screensavers or employed in advertising to evoke the seemingly immaterial “clouds” of information that connect us, for better or worse. Open Skies is also the name of a NATO pact designed to carve up airspace, suggesting how even the clear blue sky above us contains many layers and secrets, and is far more regulated than the eye can see.

With Luiza Crosman, Helen Dowling, Toon Fibbe, Naïmé Perrette, Leander Schönweger, Emmanuel Van der Auwera & Jelena Vanoverbeek.

Coming up next year at WIELS
 

Thao Nguyen Phan
February 1-April 26, 2020
Opening: January 31, 2020

Wolfgang Tillmans
February 1-May 31, 2020
Opening: January 31, 2020