Kasper Akhøj, Evelyne Axell &
Lorna Macintyre
22 October 2010 – 16 January 2011
Opening:
October 21 2010,
18:30 – 21:00
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels
Belgium
Each artist is presented by a different curator.
Kasper Akhøj After the Fair
Angelique Campens has chosen Danish artist Kasper Akhøj (b. 1976). For his first solo exhibition in Belgium, After the Fair, Akhøj will present a number of his research-based works incorporating photography, slide projections and sculptural installation. Starting out somewhere not so distant from the testimony gathering and fact-finding methods of a historian, combined with an element of chance, the works in the exhibition propose a counterpoint to previously registered stories of modern architecture and design. Through an accumulation of collected narratives, historical layers, associations, digressions and formal play, Akhøj arrives at a reconfiguration of significant but lesser known architectural endeavors which have been sidelined merely by force of circumstance.
Evelyne Axell Contestatory Images
Dirk Snauwaert presents the work of Evelyne Axell (1935-1972) gathered under the exhibition title Contestatory Images. Axell was a Belgian Pop artist and early feminist whose represention of female sexuality has recently been rediscovered. Featuring a dozen works, the exhibition at Wiels addresses the relationships between subject and form which, in Axell’s work, lead to playful and erotic pop-psychedelic images. Some works in this show address societal issues related to political events of the time (May ’68, the racial laws in the U.S., the student movements, etc); others are provocative and seductive representations of female sexuality and its role in the sexual revolution, a theme that Axell continuously explored during her short career. Even within the Pop movement, Axell’s explicit and exuberant images occupy a special position, which the exhibition and series of accompanying lectures and film program will demonstrate.
Lorna Macintyre Granite and Rainbow
Elena Filipovic invited Scottish artist Lorna Macintyre (b. 1977). Macintyre based her new sculptural and photographic installation for her first solo exhibition in Belgium on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, written in 1931, the same year that the former brewery of Wiels was built. Taking this fortuitous temporal connection between Woolf’s most experimental novel and the origins of an exhibition space, Macintyre weaves an elusive narrative in space that centers on the passage of time—from sunrise to sunset—that is the red thread of The Waves. The resultant exhibition, Granite and Rainbow, extends her interest in giving a concrete form to literary sources, which Macintyre often does through the construction of handmade assemblages of found objects or photographic recordings of quotidian moments that start from a textual or mythological starting point. Little in the result obviously or explicitly reveals her sources, which are transformed by chance, gesture, and interpretation, but one could say that it is precisely in this process of translation that her elegant compositions in space find their particular way of speaking.
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels
Belgium
T +32 (0)2 340 00 50
www.wiels.org
Wed – Sun 11:00 – 18:00
Nocturne, every 1st and 3rd Wed of the month 11:00 – 21:00
Mon – Tue closed
Press
angie.vandycke@wiels.org
T +32 (0)2 340 00 51
