Raqs Media Collective
Revolution/Restoration part 2
07 May - 06 june 2004
curators: Barbara Vanderlinden & Dirk Snauwaert
Petit Chateau Website
The Wherehouse project
Raqs Media Collective
07.05 > 06.06.2004
Revolution/Restoration part 2
An experimental programme of contemporary art forms the core of the multi-disciplinary Revolution/Restoration project which started in 2003 and go on for three years. Throughout the season, young artists have a blank cheque to reflect their vision of the Centre for Fine Arts as a building and as an institution: how was it designed and arranged, what is its place in the urban landscape and in the cultural and socio-economic fabric of Brussels, and how will it work in future?
curators: Barbara Vanderlinden & Dirk Snauwaert
Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is a collective of artists from New Delhi working with new media, video, sound, photography and text. They are using various themas such as anthropology, sociology and urbanistic. The Collective is co-founder of the new Media initiative Sarai (www.sarai.net) and is mainly interest in the actual importance of cities. The Wherehouse project is a constellation of images, objects and writings in an online space and a physical environment designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment.
It constitutes an assemblage of reflections on time, memory, movement, stasis and location in a world where some people are forced to abandon home, and others can be seen as being imprisoned by their assumptions of stability about their present location. The constellation intends to raise questions about our moorings in the materiality of the world we inhabit, and our certainties about our destinies. The work emerges from Raqs’ ongoing concern with forms of legality and illegality in the contemporary world, as well as from a period of intense engagement in the course of focused workshops with residents of detention centres for illegal foreigners in Brussels, ex-illegal foreigners, and recent refugees in Frankfurt and Hanau, and also a drive to collect material objects from the inhabitants of Brussels.
The first phase of the project took place in Frankfurt in March during a Raqs residency in Frankfurt at Das TAT, at the invitation of the curator, Louise Neri. The second phase of the project will take the form of an installation at the Centre for Fine Arts which uses video, photography, printed books, a web site, sound and solicited objects as part of the “Revolution-Restoration” programme. The exhibition will be preceded by an intensive four-day “Wherehouse” workshop at the Reception Centre for Refugees and Asylum Seekers at the Petit Chateau in Brussels. This workshop will be undertaken in collaboration with Fedasil, Federal Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, at the Petit Chateau.
Petit Chateau Website
Also in the context of Revolution/Restoration part 2
Looking for Alfred / Leytonstone
Johan Grimonprez
December 2004
During the second phase of the Revolution/Restoration project, a dinner attended by doubles will be held in June 2004: Hitchcock figures invited by Johan Grimonprez, whose acts and gestures will be captured on camera. A performance which will test the concept of reality. The result of this “dinner” will be the subject of a film, Looking for Alfred/Leytonstone, to be shown at the Centre for Fine Arts throughout the month of December.
Free entrance
Tuesdays to Sundays 10:00 am > 6:00 pm
Thursday until 9:00pm
Info + 32 2 507 82 00
