HORNU.- Le Regard éloigné
A Selection from the Collection
Bringing together some fifteen works from the MACS collection, the exhibition underscores the critical reach of an anthropological vision that embraces the near and the far, the familiar and the foreign, the centre and the periphery.
This shift in focus produces a double reframing: a gaze turned outward towards elsewhere and, in turn, estranged from itself as though seen from without by a foreign eye. Putting into practice what Claude Lévi-Strauss, that “astronomer of human constellations,” calls “the distant gaze,” these artists seek to bring the distant closer and push the near further away, to illuminate the one through the other.
Theirs is a reformed humanism where the modern and the traditional, the rational and the sensuous, and progress and nature, are at last reconciled. Just as Marcel Broodthaers’ geopoetic atlas reduces the outlines of different states to the same scale, creating an archipelago of kindred othernesses, this subversion of boundaries is also a struggle against ethnocentrism and the imperialist model of the “conquest of space.”
Against the backdrop of globalisation, many of the works presented here foreground minorities who have been affected for generations by acculturation, exclusion or immigration within territories marked by a colonial history: from the Naxi of Tibetan origin in China (Emily Bates) to the Native Americans of North America (Jimmie Durham), and the young undocumented Comorian migrants on the island of Mayotte.
Like Johan Muyle’s Tireur d’épine (The Thorn-Puller), wrested from Christian iconography to become a tragic and ironic allegory of atonement, does contemporary art have a mission to warn us — much like the anthropologist — of the fatal destiny that awaits a humanity whose gaze, absorbed by the near, has neglected the far?
Featuring works by: Adel Abdessemed, Emily Bates, Marcel Berlanger, Marie Bovo, Marcel Broodthaers, Jimmie Durham, Jot Fau, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Mekhitar Garabedian, Alexis Gautier, Laura Henno, Olivia Hernaïz, Alfredo Jaar, Tarik Kiswanson, Michaël Matthys, Johan Muyle, Emmanuelle Quertain.
Lucia Bru
Aux choses mêmes
Over the past thirty years, Lucia Bru (1970, Brussels) has developed a sculptural practice grounded in an experimental approach to materials — paper, crystal, porcelain, cement, and plaster — in which geometry and chance converge to form structures that are at once minimal and complex.
The cubes, cages, grids, squares, and even mirrors that constitute the main “families” of her work emerge as the empirical outcome of deliberate interventions and the erratic reactions of the materials. Attentive to the responses of the materials she explores through a creative process open to chance, the sculptor positions herself as an interlocutor for a mineral world whose agency, memory, and surprising fluidity she acknowledges, opening it to the organic, the animal, and the human.
Through drawing, photography, and video, Lucia Bru seeks to render tangible the fragile and transient presence of a breath, a reflection, a fold, a curve, a hollow, or a shadow. This same attentiveness to the sketch — vulnerable by nature — has, since her early days, led her to preserve every attempt on the shelves of her studio, gradually forming a living and vital archive of her own practice.
These experimentations — as discreet as they are surprising — whose composition recalls Eva Hesse’s celebrated Test Pieces, offer both a retrospective and forward-looking view of Lucia Bru’s practice.
Ravi de te connaître
Les dons au Musée
Since its foundation, MACS has benefited from the generosity of artists, collectors and galleries, who have donated works to its acquisitions committee. To date, the collection comprises around one hundred works acquired in this way.
While some donations have made it possible to complete groups of works otherwise purchased by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, others have enabled the museum to incorporate works it had previously exhibited and, in some cases, produced.
Reflecting the diversity of the collection across disciplines, this ensemble speaks above all to themes and dialectics that are especially present in contemporary art: collective and individual memory, the social and private body, and the natural and mental landscape.
Under the sign of the encounter that generates affect, in Spinoza’s sense, the exhibition Ravi de te connaître offers an invitation to discover part of this collection through a selection of works brought together by affinity. It also provides an opportunity to thank all those who, through their donations, have contributed to enriching the Museum’s collection.
With works from: Marianne Berenhaut, Maurice Blaussyld, Dirk Braeckman, Raoul De Keyser, Ronny Delrue, Marlene Dumas, Lionel Estève, Bernard Gaube, Paul den Hollander, Kim Jones, Steve Kaspar, Barbara et Michael Leisgen, Mark Manders, Fausto Melotti, Éric Poitevin, José María Sicilia, Luc Tuymans, James Welling.
