Artists

Hana Miletic, Laurent Dupont, Marina Pinsky, Angharad Williams, Chéri Samba, Ethan Assouline, Arnaud Eubelen, Danai Anesiadou, Kasper Bosmans, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Shaun Motsi, Emile Rubino, Michael Van den Abeele, Willem Oorebeek, Walter Swennen, Béla Feldberg, Chantal Akerman, Céline Mathieu, Mona Filleul, Michaela Schweighofer, Aglaia Konrad, Sophie Podolski, Sammy Baloji, Jana Euler, Marianne Berenhaut, Jef Cornelis, Collectif Faire-Part, Gust Duchateau, Felix Kindermann, Stéphane Mandelbaum, Jurgen Ots, Beat Streuli

Press release

Brussels is not a city of seamless processes. It is precisely through its imperfections, improvisations and prosthetic fixes that the city unfolds its singular, almost deranged energy. Alongside its dysfunctionality, the pervasive appropriation and reinterpretation of histories, spaces and objects shape the urban fabric. In Brussels, the permeability between urban life and artistic practice is unusually direct. What is encountered on the street finds its way into the work. Even the name Brussels, derived from Old Dutch and meaning “home in the swamp”, points to a soft, fermenting substratum from which new forms continually emerge.

Anyone living in Brussels is confronted with bricolage: car bodies wrapped in adhesive tape, buildings secured by makeshift means, peculiar shop windows. The makeshift leaves scars upon the urban body, which in turn generate their own form of permanence. Ad hoc structures establish themselves wherever responsibilities begin to fray: Brussels consists of nineteen municipalities, just as many mayors, a web of regional and national competences, historical lines of conflict, and monarchical representation. Set against the city’s fragile structural cohesion are the heavyweight presences of the EU and NATO. Since the 1950s, the European Quarter has undergone the kind of urban redevelopment for which the term “Brusselisation” was coined. The word now appears wherever history disappears under the pressure of new forms of expediency.

Curated by Fabian Flückiger and Valérie Knoll