Spring 2017

S.M.A.K. is pleased to present a series of projects to enter the spring season. With new exhibitions and collaborative projects, the museum is putting great emphasis on issues such as its institutional embedding, artistic and participatory creation, as well as the continental shifts in the Western narrative on art and its histories. The museum embraces its position at the intersection of encounter, experiment and doubt.

Anna Oppermann: Neverending Paradox. Philosophical Ensembles of the Late 1980s
March 11–June 4, 2017 at S.M.A.K. Ghent
The work of Anna Oppermann (1940-93, Germany) is pioneering in the way it brings together ideas from process art, conceptual art, arte povera and performance of the 1960s and 1970s. The artist composed variable assemblages of objects, texts, photographs, coloured photo-canvases and paintings, which she named “ensembles.” This exhibition brings three of the late philosophical ensembles together for the first time: Myth and Enlightenment (1985-92), Paradoxical Intentions – To lie the Blue down from the Sky (1988-92) and On the one hand… on the other hand; both… and (M+M) (1988-92).

The exhibition was curated by Ute Vorkoeper and realized in collaboration with the Anna Oppermann Estate and Galerie Barbara Thumm.

Dirk Zoete: To be determined. According to the situation
March 11–June 4, 2017 at S.M.A.K. Ghent
The work of Dirk Zoete (1969, Roeselare) comprises drawing, photography, scale models, sculpture, performance and video as possible realisations of what emerges in the freedom of the studio. His drawings sketch an intriguing world populated by animal and human figures in a variety of settings: from architectural, mechanical structures to agrarian and domestic scenes. Details such as costumes and masks indicate a stage setting and the artist has also recently made them three-dimensional in the form of freestanding metal sculptures or “bühnekaders” with masked dolls, performance and video art.

Kristof Van Gestel: Idiosyncratic Machine
March 11–June 4, 2017 at S.M.A.K. Ghent
In January 2016, S.M.A.K invited Kristof Van Gestel (1976, Turnhout) for an artist’s residence to share his experience-oriented practice with the public in a temporary studio in the museum. Using a draw-and-cut technique he developed himself, participants are playfully prompted to reflect on such notions as chance and choice, individuality and commonality, action and reflection. This presentation of the project in the museum is the final stage of the artist’s residence and part of Knowing by Doing, a platform for participatory art projects that the artist set up as part of his research at KASK/School of Arts of University College Ghent.

John Knight
March 24–May 21, 2017 at CC Strombeek and S.M.A.K. Ghent
Since 2013, Cultural Center Strombeek and S.M.A.K. Ghent are running the joint exhibition program Museum Culture Strombeek/Ghent. In this framework Bohemian Grove is a project by the American artist John Knight (1945, lives in Los Angeles, works in situ) at the Cultural Center Strombeek. It takes its name of a work initially developed for the Berlin Galerie Neu and installed in situ at its project space MD72 in 2013. It was reconfigured at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery New York in 2014. Simultaneously, Treize à la douzaine, a work initially produced for the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR) in 1991, is installed at S.M.A.K. Ghent.

Kader Attia: Repairing the Invisible
March 31—October 1, 2017 at S.M.A.K. Ghent
Kader Attia (1970, Seine-Saint-Denis) is internationally recognised for the pressing manner in which he explores personal and societal notions of trauma and repair through an artistic practice that involves assemblages, reparations and appropriation. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the textile course at KASK/School of Arts of University College Ghent, the artist is presenting a new work comprising found fabrics of various African origins that display a number of manual repairs. The installation occupies the room like a still life. The film essay Reflecting Memory, for which the artist received the 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp, is also having its Belgian premiere during this exhibition.

This exhibition runs parallel to Plain/Purl at the Design museum Gent and is being held as part of EXTRA, with the support of the Institut français and the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in Belgium.