Location: Werfstraat 13, 1000 Brussels (BE)
“Today there is a related paradigm in advanced art on the left: the artist as ethnographer. The object of contestation remains, at least in part, the bourgeois institution of autonomous art, its exclusionary definitions of art, audience, identity. But the subject of association has changed: it is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the artist often struggles. And yet, despite this shift, basic assumptions with the old productivist model persist in the new quasi-anthropological paradigm.”
—Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 302
In her work the Belgian artist Bie Michels centers on observing, registering, and questioning the representation of the ‘other’. Her videos, prints and installations not only question her own position with regard to the subject, but in the process of her creation she allows ‘others’ to collaborate or comment on them. Thus the gaze or the view of the ‘outsider(s)’ is an inherent part of the final result. Michels experiments with cooperative projects and juggles with narrative structures, which allows her to undermine the dominant Western gaze and the myth of the univocal story. The exhibition Dialoguing Gazes sheds light on some of the strategies the artist uses to mix up various points of view, histories and story lines in their work. In the exhibition, Michels deals with recent and historical developments in Madagascar. In the works presented here the culturally and emotionally charged object of the brick functions as a powerful metaphor for the colonial history and the later postcolonial development of the country. (Read more)
Article in HART Magazine (in Dutch)
Curator Ive Stevenheydens
Photos Dirk Pauwels, Bie Michels