2016 program

The Boghossian Foundation is pleased to announce the 2016 program for the Villa Empain in Brussels, the first created under the artistic direction of Asad Raza. He is part of the Foundation’s new directorial team, along with general manager Louma Salamé and public program curator Nicola Setari. The Boghossian Foundation aims to use art to create dialogue between East and West; the Villa Empain will create an analogous dialogue between the intimacy of the private home and the democratic spirit of the public space. The goal of the program is to animate the Villa: to make it a place of exhibitions, work, shared activity, and vibrant processes.

Running throughout the year, Inhabitation is a hybrid residency and public presentation series that invites visual artists, choreographers, writers, musicians, and curators to live and work together. Devising new ways to present work in progress, participants make use of the Villa’s galleries, salons, and a newly constructed recording studio. 2016 participants include Sophia Al-Maria, Fatima Al-Qadiri, Descha Daemgen, Leland de la Durantaye, Jessica Dickinson, Andrew Durbin, Deanna Havas, Moriah Evans, Janine Harrington, Andrew Hardwidge, Sahra Motalebi, Marlie Mul, and Adrián Villar Rojas.

Opening May 12, Répétition is an exhibition curated by Nicola Lees and Raza. Conceived as a circulatory system by which images, objects, and bodies move through the Villa Empain, the exhibition traces the global distribution of graphic art across cultural boundaries, focusing on the productive power of accidents. Artists include Abbas Akhavan, Nairy Baghramian, Dexter/Sinister, Shannon Ebner, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Istvan Ist Huzjan, Jumana Manna, Otobong Nkanga, Lydia Ourahmane, Robert Rauschenberg, Giles Round, Mariana Telleria, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and the historic collection of prints from the Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial.

Periodically weaving in and out of Répétition, choreographer Andros Zins-Browne will perform Already Unmade, a new work conceived especially for the Villa Empain, in which he revisits his personal history of choreography, altering it through its repetition. Reversing the normal order, Zins-Browne’s piece begins with finished, “choreographic objects” and subjects them to an ensuing process where they begin to unravel.

The Embassy of Uncertain Shores, a public program drafted by Nicola Setari (Catholic University of Leuven), provides a space of encounter and debate for those who physically, intellectually and diplomatically search for shores beyond the reefs and rifts in Europe and close by. The embassy will be dedicated to the artistic research of artists, opening in early May with a performance lecture series by Slavs and Tatars.

Décor, opening in September and co-curated by Tino Sehgal, Dorothea von Hantelmann, and Raza, embraces the decorative as a fundamental aspect of the plastic arts. An exhibition about the decorative in modern and contemporary art, it is, at the same time, simply a decoration of the Villa Empain.

In autumn, Schema for a school will bring students to the Villa in autumn to explore the philosophical topics of experience and embodiment through exercises, actions and practices gleaned from the history of alternative pedagogy, eventually resulting in a student-run space, in which students host visitors to the Villa. In collaboration with Princeton University, atopia will be an encounter with classical antiquity enacted by a group of historians, theorists and artists. Displacing the familiar Western narrative, atopia locates ancient Greece in a space between everywhere and somewhere. 

About the Boghossian Foundation
The Boghossian Foundation was created in 1992 by Robert Boghossian and his sons, Jean and Albert, Lebanese jewelers of Armenian origin. The Foundation realizes social and educational projects in Armenia, Belgium, Lebanon, and Switzerland. In 2006 they began restoring Brussels’ historic Art Deco masterwork, the Villa Empain. In 2010 the Foundation opened the Villa to the public as a center for art and dialogue between East and West. Since December 2015, its team has been led by Ralph Boghossian, Raza and general manager Louma Salamé.

For more information, please contact Caroline Schuermans: communication [​at​] boghossianfoundation.be / T +32 2 627 52 30