Les filles du calvaire gallery invites curator Lise Bruyneel for a winter exhibition. Dans tes brumes brings together the work of Dirk Braeckman, Julie Calbert, Katrien De Blauwer, Antoine De Winter, Renée Lorie, Stéphanie Roland, Dries Segers, Lore Stessel, and Laure Winants.
This exhibition speaks of a city’s energy, of erasure and forgetting, of the sudden and the unexpected. It is an exhibition on the weather of disappearance: a white space, swallowed by fog, where visitors can play at vanishing and dream of a world that goes on without them. At a time when we are constantly compelled to be available, this is an exhibition that renders us unavailable.
It’s an exhibition where the artists, too, play at vanishing from their own works by integrating chance and accident into their creative process. An exhibition on the boundary between art forms, featuring photographs that look like paintings and paintings that almost seem photographic; photographs on stone; camera-less photographs; photo montages cut with scissors, with bodies borrowed from magazines. This is an exhibition using as lenses million-year-old air bubbles, where apertures are widened to let in light until it burns the film.
It is an exhibition that questions what we take with us from landscapes we have gazed upon, what we keep from the gestures of those we have loved, and what remains within us of the world when we close our eyes. In the face of the urgent climate crisis, this is an exhibition that questions our desire to reproduce the image with accuracy, even as we fail to preserve its source. It confronts us with the specter of our own disappearance.
This is an exhibition where science flirts with science fiction, taking us to the depths of oceans and glaciers, where ice creates fabulous color gradients, where postcards appear with the warmth of our hands, where we visit ghost islands and communities so small that human relationships seem magnified under a lens.
It’s an exhibition that frees up storage space, leaving room for visitors to take in the works, opening the sensory experience to scents and sounds, bringing out rainbows, holographic images, and other mirages. It’s an exhibition where the weather is cloudy, and the temperatures are slightly above seasonal norms. And to begin with, in Brussels, it’s not raining.
— Lise Bruyneel and Simon Hatab
