Orla Barry: Shaved Rapunzel & La Petite Bergère Punk / Ariane Loze: L’Archipel du moi

Orla Barry: Shaved Rapunzel & La Petite Bergère Punk
Devised by artist and shepherd Orla Barry, the exhibition Shaved Rapunzel & La Petite Bergère Punk invites visitors to discover a double world: that of the sheep that Barry raises on her farm in Ireland and that of the stories she records in her poetic texts and objects and transmits orally through stagings of her tales. Her hybrid, fluid universe, which intertwines animal and human, reality and fiction, masculine and feminine, art and pedigree, is immediately apparent in the materials (raw wool and felt), objects (crooks) and situations (livestock auctions, pedigree competitions) that she transposes from her rural environment into her work. Working in a profession rarely practiced by women, Orla Barry also sees herself as a “punk shepherd” who resists both patriarchal norms and hippy “back to the land” clichés.

The multidisciplinary work of Irish artist Orla Barry (b. 1969, Wexford) has been presented in numerous exhibitions across Europe, notably in Portugal at the Quetzal Art Centre (2017) and the Museu Bernardo in Lisbon (2011), at the Mothers Tankstation (2014) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2006) in Dublin, at the Camden Arts Centre in London (2005), and at W139 in Amsterdam (2005). In Belgium, where she lived for 16 years, her work was featured in several solo exhibitions, notably at Mu.Zee in Ostend (2019), S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2005), and Argos in Brussels (2002). After returning to Ireland in 2009 to live on her father’s farm, where she subsequently began to work as a farmer raising pedigree Lleyn sheep, Orla Barry has gradually drawn on her professional activity as a shepherd for her art, through a poetic practice that is sometimes written or visual, sometimes sung or performed. In recent years, her performances have been presented as part of Performatik 17: The Brussels Biennial of Performance Art at Argos (2017), the WoWmen Festival KAAI (2020) and Playground at the M-Museum in Leuven (2019).

Ariane Loze: L’Archipel du moi
Ariane Loze’s first solo museum exhibition, L’Archipel du moi marks an important moment in the career of this Belgian artist whose pared-down and satirical video works have gained increasing recognition in the contemporary art field in recent years. Accompanied by an extensive catalogue covering almost fifteen years of Loze’s production, the exhibition brings together works in which she embodies and directs a wide and varied range of characters who together express our difficulty in achieving social harmony and inner balance in an increasingly conflictual world. The exhibition also presents Energeia, a new video triptych specially created for Le Grand-Hornu, a (meta)physical meditation on energy and the ways in which it is extracted, transformed or preserved.

In recent years, Ariane Loze (b. 1988 in Brussels) has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and in the United States. She has presented performances in prestigious Belgian institutions such as Bozar, the S.M.A.K., the Fondation Hermès and the Boghossian Foundation. She has also received a number of commissions from major public institutions, most recently the National Museum of Contemporary Art (ΣMST) in Athens, for an exhibition curated by Katerina Gregos. Her works have been acquired by major public collections, including those of the Centre national des Arts plastiques (Cnap) in Paris, KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels, and Le MACS Grand-Hornu.