In the presence or the absence of the artists, Komplot introduces the video works of Messieurs Delmotte, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost and Agnès Geoffray
This program is about talk: talking about, over and through art, self mythologizing and reinvention. How speech can be sized, appropriated, manipulated and spun by artists to create new works, recycle existing ones, whether it be their own creations, historical events or the discourse of an emphatic art critic. In those works traveling from Brussels, a Babel like vision of the perspectives, entanglements and clashes that discourse allows is never far away. But if 'art speech' may seem 'theirs' in all the meaningful distortions of it's practice, the purpose of this confrontation-cum-performance is precisely to make it 'ours'.
Messieurs Delmotte (°1967, B, lives in Liège) created the four video's series 'Fränz ünd Köfon' (12 min) in non-german, non-english and french, in 2004, for VOLLEVOX, a project about the voice curated by Komplot. Delmotte, a self-declared poser, sneers at the institutionalized art world with his mischievous and surprising actions, trivial in content and simple in form. He takes the appearance of several archetypical cultural disciples - the American rock hero, the surly German artist, the DJ freak, the cultural politician - and he takes a stance between meaning and nonsense, between the identifiable and the surreal. The results are uncomplicated and unvarnished, but also pure and most of all irresistibly charming. Or, as Delmotte puts it himself: "Je le fais, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais je le fais!".
Simona Denicolai (°1972, I, lives in Brussels) and Ivo Provoost (°1974, B, lives in Brussels) work together since 1998. Stating "We like the metaphor of the earthworm, and particularly its relation with its context, to talk about our way of working. The earthworm swallows its context, digests it and defecates it, in order to survive and move in its environment.", their working practice, like many collaborations, denies the intuitive artistic touch or the hand of the individual artist and involves discussion and re-discussion to arrive at the finished pieces. It is what happened after they presented the video 'TO BE HERE (HAPPY)' (19 min) at the occasion of the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 2005; they published the text 'Warning to a young painter ', as a telephone piece, that Marko Stamenkovic had written in reaction to the reception of their work.
Agnès Geoffray's (°1973, F, lives in Brussels) work often aims at infiltrating reality by questioning its narratives. Her last video 'Comment j'en suis venue à l'art' (2006, 15 min) starts in a conventional way as a regular interview with radio journalist Thierry Génicot: Talking about her work, and more specifically about her last exhibition at La lettre volée, Brussels, Geoffray evokes the way she appropriates a fictional universe, recycling elements of "unheimlich" ordinary life in her art works, before giving a splendid and staggering demonstration of this in the very interview that is being filmed.
The video program will be augmented by a screening of sections from Sad In Country, a documentary by Kosten Koper (°1970, UK, lives in Brussels) & Catherine Vertige, on the subject of artist collectives in Belgium, featuring Club Moral (Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven & Danny Devos), Building Underwood (Simona Denicolai, Ivo Provoost, David Evrard) amongst others.
With the Support of the CGRI : Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique.
