NAMUR.- The exhibition noli me tangere brings together six artists who question the condition and presence of the body - its gravity, its anamorphoses, its real or projected presence.
The title (Do not touch me in English) is, in the biblical story, the sentence pronounced by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she wants to touch him to ensure his real existence. It is also a chapter of Jean-Luc Nancy's "Corpus" subtitled "Essay on the lifting of the body".
It suggests both the body that can be touched and not, and the perception that a person can have - and thus questions the perception of the visible, the sensible, the tangible and their representation in the world today.
It is also a nod to the animals who were taken to this place and who, if they had been gifted with language, could have called "do not touch me". Les Abattoirs de Bomel - the former slaughterhouses of Namur - have been transformed into a cultural center and exhibition space. It is a place that gives great importance to its former function, but the traces of which have been erased - with the exception of some important details in the signaling of the different spaces.
This exhibition project was developed with the artists Lázara Rosell Albaer, Roger Ballen, Claude Cattelain, Pieter De Clercq, Nancy Moreno and Benjamin Verhoeven in close relation to the context and history of the place. The installations, paintings, videos, architectures and performative works presented in the Bomel Slaughterhouses share a certain aura and evoke Freud's 'unheimlichkeit', a disturbing and at the same time recognizable 'strangeness'.
There is a certain form of (un) physical presence in the old slaughterhouses, which remain a metaphor for a world of change, in mutation. The body (physical, digital, architectural), which is also that of a world in mutation, is depicted in the exhibition space where the massacres also took place.
— Tania Nasielski, curator
With: Lázara Rosell Albaer, Roger Ballen, Claude Cattelain, Pieter De Clercq, Nancy Moreno and Benjamin Verhoeven
